Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
An Orange, a Syllable

An Orange, a Syllable

Sze, Gillian

Paperback

General Poetry

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1770418512
ISBN13: 9781770418516
Publisher: Misfit Book
Published: Sep 2 2025
Pages: 88
Weight: 0.29
Height: 0.24 Width: 5.64 Depth: 8.45
Language: English
An Orange, A Syllable by Gillian Sze is one of the most beautiful and emotionally resonant works I've read in a long time. -- My Asian Era blog

An Orange, A Syllable details a period of maternal and artistic transformation. This prosimetrical work is a meditation on motherhood, language, and art. The central speaker witnesses the earliest utterances of her child and launches into a poetic inquiry of words themselves, asking, How to measure one's mouth by its words? The speaker seeks an answer amidst the language that surrounds her -- words misspoken, mispronounced, remembered, unwritten -- and, in doing so, struggles with signification and significance.

Each prose poem in the five-part collection darts between the many meanings of fit -- as in a sudden burst of emotion or to be the right size and shape, and the archaic fytte (a section of a poem). A text becomes an open mouth, a square day of a calendar, or a bare fragment of a narrative. The final section of the book is an intimate and ekphrastic engagement with the work of Danish painter Vilhelm Hammersh i. Drawn to Hammersh i's paintings of the empty rooms of his apartment, the speaker recognizes a familiar space of art's insistence.

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