Autobiography of a Stutterer by Joseph Cooper

In Autobiography of a Stutterer, Joseph S. Cooper has realized a beautifully timed sequence of works running through the double gates of lips and teeth, and faith and love. He arrives at the fabulous tongue, personal runway of language, and from there the words take off and return in a series of spasmodic flights that together comprise a breakthrough book. Like a new family member, please welcome it and enjoy its unpredictably bright and wide-eyed movements.

-Reed Bye

Joseph S. Cooper’s, Autobiography of a Stutterer positions the reader (performer) in the liminal spaces between articulation and interruption, fluency and stuttering, the spaces between monologue and dialogue, language and body, in order to develop a narrative wholly engaging, critically poised, and deconstructive. It is no small accomplishment that this autobiography carries within it a specific subjectivity (the author’s) at the same time it stages the desubjectification of its readers/performers. This text allows you to lose yourself within it, as one ethical body encountering another. In fact it holds the potential to reveal how being a more ethically responsible human might be to do just that.

-Jared Hayes

Joseph S. Cooper writes where the body does not exactly say yes but where it wants something else. By this I mean the bodies he is making are profoundly wild: propelled by phonetic imperatives and breaks in the deep structure that could be described as aberrant, but which I prefer to think of as delicious. What is a mouth and where is it going? I read his work as a future for the tongue, whether that’s English, pre-English or the English that’s dismayed and privately ashamed (in a good way) to find itself in such proximity to the teeth. I suggest wearing a gum-shield. I suggest serving Jell-O to your guests. Joseph S. Cooper is a genius and, to find out how the party really got going, I suggest you open this amazing, completely frightening book.

-Bhanu Kapil

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Joseph S. Cooper is originally from Buffalo, NY. He is the recipient of an M.F.A. from Naropa University. His most recent publications include The American Drivel Review, Big Game Books, BlazeVox 2k6, Bombay Gin, Dusie Press, Hot Whiskey Magazine, Small Town, and String of Small Machines. His chapbook entitled, “Insuring the Wicker Man Shadow Created Delusion,” co-authored with Jared Hayes, was published by Hot Whiskey Press 2005. 

Book Information:

· Paperback: 101 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] (Dec 2006)
· ISBN : 1-934289-29-9

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