Unbound Edition Press today announced it will publish Leah Souffrant’s literary experiment Entanglements: threads woven from history, memory, and the body. The title is scheduled for release in March 2023.
Entanglements intersects personal narrative, poetry, and critical theory to examine how subjective experience reshapes and gives meaning to everyday events. The genre-bending work invites readers to engage in the same interpretive experience that Souffrant documents around subjects such as love, justice, power, and epistemology.
“Each person has a private archive: those works we’ve discovered and remembered, the readings we keep close and that keep us, ropes of thought holding us captive and reaching beyond what we actively remember,” Souffrant says. “Our private archives are our evidence of entanglement.”
Souffrant reveals her private archives to provoke readers’ recollections of their own. The reading experience of her work creates a deep and satisfying entanglement between writer and reader, text and interpretation. “I want to fit the broken pieces together. Skin and eyes and ideas, memory and the touch, the touch now and its memory later,” she writes.
Patrick Davis, publisher at Unbound Edition Press, says, “Reading Leah’s manuscript was a intellectual and bodily phenomenon. I could feel my own life experiences, memories, and reading becoming interwoven with hers. It was one of the most intimate reading experiences of my life, and I want other readers to have that same unexpected, joyful experience with this book. I knew we had to publish it.”
“Interdisciplinary views shape all of my work, whether essay writing, poetic theory, charcoal drawing, or feminist readings. I simply cannot see life experiences as separate or even categorically definable.” Souffrant writes about the Salem Witch Trials with the same immediacy as about private memories. “Once both are located in the past, they become instantly entangled and accessible in the present,” Souffrant says. Entanglements includes six of Souffrant’s drawings throughout the work.
Leah Souffrant is a writer and artist living in Brooklyn. She is the author of Plain Burned Things: A Poetics of the Unsayable (Liège 2017) and teaches writing at New York University. More about Souffrant can be found at leahsouffrant.com and @mostly_leah.
