Tressing Motions at the Edge of Mistakes

“Hearing it is beauty itself. Boukaila is a dreamer who frees the reader freeing the mind to dream greet vex beauty. Make greeting freedom become reality by reading this treeing yearning freedom book yes yes.”

“This is an astonishing, time-bending book that has me dancing in cyclonic cycles of questioning and in delicate eddies of sound. In poems that perceive perception and trace thought itself, Imane Boukaila makes kinesthetic what is static, and makes static what moves too quickly for us to attend. Within controlled vocabularies, she moves between verse and essay, polemic and visual storms, with pirouetting improvisation and deft concrete strategies. In this, she participates in aesthetic traditions that host poets interested in the material page—as distinct as Derek Beaulieu and giovanni singleton, bpNichol and Larry Eigner—and poets whose quarrel and quandary is with the cusp of meaning where thought sunders to sound—Jordan Scott, Susan Howe, JJJJJerome Ellis, and Douglas Kearney. TDivya Victor, author of Curbhis book moved me in the very places where I was made still.”

“Words and letters swirl and eddy, weaving tresses of expressive intensity at the fracture zone between autistic thinking and the neurotypical ‘truths’ that rock and channel it. ‘Hacking language norms,’ as she puts it, Imane Boukaila ‘mistakes’ truth so as to trick it into restreaming into a resurgent dance of thought equal to the challenges and beauty of autistic experience. Tressing Motions at the Edge of Mistakes is a turbulent achievement foaming with creative thinking and poetic inventiveness.”

“Boukaila’s boundary-pushing debut explores truth, reluctance, and an unrestrained mind. […] This challenging yet rewarding collection expands the concept of what language can do.”