“Archival and speculative, Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez’ A/An is a revisioning of the Salem Witch Trials into a portfolio of court ephemera, converging thematically despite and through its divergent forms. It’s precisely what we haven’t escaped of the Trials that blooms here: the spectacle of adjudication, the self-righteousness of the law and legibility, coloniality’s self-exception. Sovereignty is haunted: an invisable hande pushes us forthe. Gutmann-Gonzalez deftly summons the past and present’s continuity through this possible lyric alternative. A/An is a distillation, a reduction, a tincture of the ever-renewable past. Handle cautiously—this is yr book.”
– Jos Charles (she/her), Pulitzer-finalist and winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series; author of a Year & other poems (2022), feeld (2018), and Safe Space (2016); and faculty at University of California Riverside in Creative Writing and Randolph College’s low-residency MFA program.
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“To my eyes, the witches, manuscript, and world(s) teem with deviance. When the examiner of Bridget Bishop asks, ‘Are we sure this is a woman? Say: ah. The evidence doth endanger a handred times,’ (4) I am loathed to agree. Without Q or A, the poem evidences how the existence of a single gender-ambiguous person destabilizes the foundation of essentially gendered body-souls. Further, Sarah Good’s observation of the Devil, that ‘[…] still he is unshe athed through our punishments,’ affirms for me the transformative power of transreality. I read here that the Devil un-shes her as relentlessly as persecution fails to vanquish his man-ifestation. Gender queerness functions to re-attune the body and/or its hungers, experienced in & off the text as [trans magic], judged by the uninitiated as corruption of the body-soul.” [read full review here]
– Crystal Odelle (they/she), author of Author of Trans Studies and chapbooks editor at Newfound, is a storyteller of trans / polyamorous / whore praxis, writing & revising into the desire for something like a life.
A/An by Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez
Published January 13, 2024
ISBN 978-1-7381784-0-7, $35 CAD / $26 US
Categories: LGBTQAI2S literature, poetry (experimental, documentary, and erasure)
Subjects: Salem Witch Trials, history & archival studies, feminism
Printing: paperback, printed and bound by Coach House Press on 70 lb Sephyr Laid paper, typeset in Sabon, 12 pt.
Using 17th century court records of the Salem Witch Trials as a sounding board, A/An mines the archives to uncover the power and violence residing within the language of the legal system. As state-legislated violence, witch hunts were constitutive to the colonial order, reinforcing what was normal and what aberrant. Rather than regarding the witch hunts as historical curiosity or speculating to fill the gaps, A/An considers the court examination as poetic form, a hybrid of legal language and lyric utterance. In these poems, English becomes foreign to itself, having distorted through time and slipped through the sieve of law, through the inevitable erasures of matter and the ideological erasures of the archive: the gaps marked “[illegible due to fold in paper],” and the silences that remain unmarked. In a poetics of the “[…]”, A/An engages with textual gaps as lacunae. In A/An, poetry and archive wrestle, shattering these legal documents that act as gravestones and spilling the voices caught therein.
Read an EXCERPT.