ma(I)ze Tassel Retrazos

Poetry. Art. Retrazos is a Spanish term used to describe the stenciled remnants that a seamstress leaves on the floor after making garments. Carlos M. Luis gathered such defiled 'retraces, ' along with magazine clippings and other found materials and repurposed them into a series of two dozen or so of the renderings that appear in this chapbook. Inspired by these images and also the Popol Vuh, Derek White weaves together textual fragments into associative personal myths that deal with cornhusks, geometry, puberty, roosters, quantum basketball, court trials, genetics, dirty laundry, brick making, fish and graduating as a foreigner from a polluted lake in Mexico. "ma(I)ze Tassel Retrazos calls up the etymological meaning of the word "text," a piece of weaving; not only does the narrative fray and reknit itself, but word and image have equal weight in weaving the text as a whole"--Joyelle McSweeney