Blue Fire
by
Proteotypes is proud to announce its latest release, Wendy Walker’s Blue Fire. This full-length book, which centers on the figure of Constance Kent, protagonist of a famous case of murder in 1860s England, breaks ground in the field of poetic nonfiction first explored by Paul Metcalf.
In Blue Fire Walker uses a set of constraints to produce two complementary texts on facing pages. On every left-hand page, by selecting one word from every line of the first book on the case (also the first book in the genre of true crime), Walker uses the author’s own patriarchal language to generate a feminist critique of his assumptions and call his account into question. On every right-hand page, using a number-based algorithm, she builds a point-of-view-free portrait of the mindset surrounding the case by quoting from all the accounts of it, from many of the books known to have been read by Constance, and from many other books published in the early 1860s.
The reader who reads “across” will thus experience the dialogue between the strongly-felt poetic text on the left and the dossier of attitudes compiled on the right. Both a long poem and a “commonplace book,” Blue Fire is a major work by one of our most important innovative writers.
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