Hitching Post by Nava Fader

During her tenure as editor of The Dial, Marianne Moore coined the term “conversity” to describe the dialogic nature of poetry. Nava Fader’s work skillfully enacts this idea of poem-as-conversation, poem-as-revision-of-received-tradition, offering magnificent lyrics that strike sparks against Mike Basinski’s original lines. In doing so, Fader raises compelling and provocative questions about the nature of literary conversity: Where do the boundaries exist between engagement and appropriation? Can the act of creative appropriation empower women as they inhabit a predominantly male tradition? What literature, what conversation doesn’t appropriate to some extent? As Fader teases out possible answers to these questions, she offers us beautiful and vibrant soundscapes, poems that crackle, sizzle, and hum.

—Kristina Marie Darling, author of Scorched Altar: Selected Poems & Stories 2007-2014

Nava Fader’s Hitching Post is a collage of wild horses willingly let loose from the domesticity of language. Fader, who pays tribute to Michael Basinski’s Trailers vis-à-vis the titles of her poems, breathes life into voiceless scenes and animates the everyday. Cascading amidst incantations, lullabies, and vows, Fader creates a rare syntactical wonderland, while unleashing the sonic layers of life and poïesis. Her synesthetic craft transforms into a mosaic, a multisensory trail that pieces together the soft, erotic, and sometimes violently lustful. Nothing is tied down to this hitching post – not even Fader, the equestrian – who leaves us with remnants of galloping rhythms and untamed echoes. These poems were written to be sung.

—Morani Kornberg-Weiss, author of Dear Darwish

In Hitching Post, poet Nava Fader leads us past lines by Michael Basinski by the ear, her lines ringing round each sound, landscape built of syllables urging themselves on, as Fader pushes us poem upon poem to believe against a background in flux. Poems meander as if we’ve untied the horse, and when Fader’s Basinski beginning goes “I listen to the cup / /for echoes tea leaves and footprints,” so do we.

—Robin Brox, author of Sure Thing

Nava Fader received her master’s in Poetics from SUNY Buffalo, writing her thesis on Adrienne Rich. She is the author of two chapbooks: Stonesoup (Slack Buddha, 2009), and The Plath Poems (Dancing Girl, 2009). Most of her poems begin with a line by somebody else. She is a school librarian in Buffalo.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 64 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-178-8

$16

Hitching Post by Nava Fader… by Geoffrey Gatza