KEROTAKIS (Paperback)

'The "corpus hermeticum," in Janice Lee's stunning collection, is the color of the blood it contains. As the body that "paints" and "listens", it "glitters" with "pigment": it bursts into flower and it crouches down on all fours to put its mouth to the ground. On a continuum from primitive to synthetic, the figures in KEROTAKIS "is[are] something which it is like to be a human being." Questions of nest, shelter, and milk arise; questions about a mineral composition arise. Like "waves." There's an extreme wetness in this book, brought into relief by the "desert" -- its feral architecture and peripheries. Reading Lee's beautiful first book, I was incredibly moved by the vulnerability of the bodies that appear in her work, and the way these bodies make intensive marks upon landscapes that almost immediately disappear. With enormous tenderness and craft - - (this writer is a design genius in a way that extends to the wiring of the lines themselves) -- Lee asks her readers: What erodes an originating point? Why do people disappear? What brings a body back to the optic and sensate domains, where it thrives, where it has a love, where it had a mother? I am not sure that this book answers these question, but it repeats them until the reader's blood rises in response. Until the reader, alchemically, becomes - also - "red."' -Bhanu Kapil, Author of Incubation: A Space For Monsters and A Vertical Interrogation of Strangers