Ar:range:ments (Pre-order)
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Ar:range:ments (Pre-order) 〰️
Can words hold a note? Can language foam like a mouth? Ar:range:ments, creates textual & visual language that escapes the page to utter and speak past the record, the archive, and the document.
Praise for AR:RANGE:MENTS
AR:RANGE:MENTS is miraculous in its ability to attend to silence and absence in such a way as to invite, at every juncture, a form of visitation. Esther Kondo Heller’s deep lyrical listening and rapt seeking prove that grief is love that persists across all manner of distance. In these poems, grief becomes a gathering ground.
–Tracy K. Smith
In Esther Kondo Heller’s tender hands, lyric utterances gather “in the conch, the ocean, in the static, the silence” of a mother now passed. The range of these arrangements astonish: film stills and movement between multiple languages call to mind Cha’s Dictée; absence and presence mark these pages in a nimble, minimal music. Kondo Heller is poet, instrument, filmmaker, visionary composer and conductor all at once in these poems. My hands clap alongside hers, and I feel the contours of her silences beside mine, traveling companions in time and space.
–Diana Khoi Nguyen
Esther K Heller
Esther K Heller (b. 1993 Berlin) is a poet, literary critic, experimental sound- and filmmaker. They are a Barbican Young Poet, an Obsidian Foundation Fellow, a Ledbury Critic, and an Image Text Ithaca Junior Fellow. Their films have screened at Berlinale Forum Expanded, Third Horizon, Alchemy Moving Image Festival, ICA London, amongst other places.
They are currently a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Harvard University, where they are working on transnational Black poetics. Their forthcoming debut poetry collection, Ar:range:ments, will be available with Fonograf Editions in March 2025.
