Tomie's Chair [Paperback]

Josey Foo (Author), Tomie Arai (Contributor)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 2, 2002

Inspired by "Arrival," Tomie Arai's 1996 mixed-media installation at the Lower East Side Printshop in New York City, Tomie's Chair is an allegory of outward and inward movement. The chair is a symbol of rest but also of decision--to rise and move beyond signposts, to change and break bonds, to be independent and create new bonds within one's own static, open spaces; to go further than the signposts at the end of a half-open road.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Inspired by a mixed-media installation by artist Tomie Aria, Foo's second book continues her explorations of other artistic disciplines and their effect on the boundaries of writing. Her debut, Endou, featured poems and essays, portions of which were included in The Best American Essays 1995, and the Leah Stein Dance Company has choreographed a series of movement dance pieces, titled Imprint, based on Foo's work. A Malaysia native of Chinese extraction who arrived in the U.S. as an undocumented alien, Foo now works as a lawyer-advocate on the Navajo Nation in New Mexico. She juxtaposes her own manipulations of chair-images with textual explorations of space, gesture, position and how individuals occupy their own history: "I am getting up.... I am enfolds what happens where unknown place begins. The results of pressed, compact place (constantly changing) tell circumstances of me.// (Rebound or remain in such situations)." Like film developing in reverse, the narrator is slowly defined by the words and places that surround her, while she also shapes that exterior reality with her own body, ultimately creating a subtle yet undeniably compelling history of displacement, loss and love: "The place, made of parts, is aging./ When the door shuts, I believe I am heart/ and soul you came for, after."
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About the Author

Josey Foo's first book of prose and poems, "Endou" was published in 1996, and portions of it were included by Jamaica Kincaid in "Best American Essays 1995". She attended the Iowa Writers Workshop and has an MFA from Brown University. Foo won the Eve of St. Agnes Award in Poetry in 1995 and is a recipient of 2001 NEA and Pennsylvania Council for the Arts Literature Fellowships. Formerly an undocumented alien working odds and ends in New York City, she is now an advocate for the Navajo Nation in Shiprock, New Mexico.

Tomie Arai is a Japanese-American visual artist.

Product Details

• Paperback: 64 pages
• Publisher: Kaya/Muae (November 2, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1885030363
• ISBN-13: 978-1885030368
• Product Dimensions: 7.2 x 6 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,612,186 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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