PASS PORT
is a travel document—a transcript of the first half of the at-sea installation SOUNDING((ING))S
, which ‘maps’ two means of crossing one border: by sea across the English Channel, and underneath the seabed through the Channel Tunnel. Bilingual wordplay destabilises two languages used to deny refugees movement across the English-French border. The installation offers the recovery and re-appropriation of sounds from and about the body—the female body in patriarchal language, the disabled body in an age of austerity and welfare cuts, and the asylum-seeking body within the EU.
“Amy Evans derives her wordplay in part at least from the hermetic and etymological linguistic investigations of another modernist poet, H.D. … —sea/water/flood puns run through her SOUND((ING))S sequence. They have the effect of being both witty and edgy: edgy in their exploration of the liminal border of land/sea and edgy in conveying a sense of threat both to and from the sea.” —Harriet Tarlo, Plumwood Mountain Journal
“Evans’ poems are delightful and dangerous firecrackers. The immediate effect is of a series of playful linguistic explosions but the pyrotechnic exuberance is quickly extinguished leaving afterimages of troubled waters. Fascinating.” —Geraldine Monk, on CONT.
“The progress of each piece feels less like dissection than revelation … Its care is underwritten by passion. She blends meanings with a rueful richness. … These collages are clever—but never callous. [Some] hold dark echoes of the world around us, and of desperate journeys. Evans’ words may be airily spaced, but ‘people/ don’t float between/ borders’. The pages move from mathematical precision into music.” —Alison Brackenbury on CONT ., PN Review
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