THE WIDE ROAD Carla Harryman & Lyn Hejinian $16 • 2011 • 148 pages • ISBN: 978-0-9823387-4-2 Original cover art by Nancy Blum What would have happened had Thelma and Louise not driven off the cliff but stayed on the road? In Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian's picaresque novella, friendship lives on to follow eros through a polymorphic landscape where their fearless, inquisitive "we" encounters "hunger in two places at once." The Wide Road is a collaborative investigation of the female body, friendship, writing, community, activism, travel and the nature and possibility of human thinking. Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian, two of the most honored innovators of language, began writing The Wide Road in 1991. Over the following twenty-years, the co-writing occurred in turn by letters, by walking, in cabins, together and apart, and finally together again. The reader of this original and major work will find that it is no longer possible to distinguish who wrote what. Instead, one finds a joyful new feminist voice breaking out new possibilities for the future of writing. The event of the making-writing of this book is now matched by the event of the making-book object of the book, for which the artist Nancy Blum drew two botanical panels, the fruit and the flower of the strawberry tree. HR Hegnauer, in discussion with editor, Rachel Levitsky and the authors, came up with two designs, and in celebration of the book’s multiple origins, Belladonna* Collaborative printed both!   Can't decide which cover to choose? Buy both for $30 and save $2!
	Individual $16.00 Institution $27.00
	Individual $16.00 Institution $27.00

SMALL PRESS DISTRIBUTION BEST-SELLER. (March, April, October 2011).

CATHY WAGNER (October 20, 2011): "An enviably intellectually-fecund friendship set itself the important work of trying to think and write sex, collaboratively, as women. I wish I’d had this book years ago. “We eroticize our earthly situations and conditions and likewise they eroticize us…Our vagina accommodates the proverbial railway station it has sometimes been compared to. To be enormous is a wish that comes over us in our hot desperation. Then, miraculously, everything on earth swells to our proportions.” Yup that’s how it works. Crazy smart and crazy sexy."

LAMBDA LITERARY'S SARA RAUCH (September 12, 2011): Sinuous, seductive, rife with sexy, feminine energy, The Wide Road (Belladonna) is hard to categorize. It blurs the line between poetry and prose, gender and sexuality, body and story, universality and individuality. Like a road, the “story” of this book flows forward—a landscape ever changing and narrated by “we.” It is a melding of voices, female voices, in the most symbiotic way imaginable. To read The Wide Road is to dive into a mystery: “Today it’s sexy for you to never know who we think we are.” Read more...

MAKE MAGAZINE'S LEN GUTKIN (September 2011): The second quarter of The Wide Road, Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian’s strange, charming, picaresque “novel,” consists of epistolary correspondence between the book’s authors. These letters comment on the work we are reading, even as they evoke an enviably intelligent creative partnership. “We seem,” writes Hejinian to Harryman, “to be particularly given to unlikely linkages, to exciting mismatches, to the creative (playful, powerful, funny, mournful) co-existence of live incommensurabilities.” Read more...

GOOD READS (August 20, 2011): The Wide Road is a supremely riotous & zaftig take on the female picaresque. Language poets Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian join forces in a collaboration of poetms & correspondence, transforming themselves into a two-headed monster who roams the countryside, seeks outrageous adventures, takes random unsuspecting lovers, and pursues a far-ranging discourse composed of wit, free association, serial exchange, philosophizing, and figurative-made-actual language. Read more...

THE POETRY PROJECT'S CORINA COPP interviews Carla Harryman & Lynn Hejinian about The Wide Road. (April / May 2011)

RON SILIMAN recommends The Wide Road. (March 22, 2011)

KARLA KELSEY for THE CONSTANT CRITIC (March 21, 2011): Here subjectivity (echoing Kristeva) is the effect of linguistic process, rather than something that comes into being before or apart from language. The collaborative nature of the book thus provides a completely different conception of the self in the world than that modeled both by the conventional journey narrative wherein man sets out alone—and by the new critical concept of the lyric, wherein the self of the poem speaks fully-formed from offstage. As such, Harryman and Hejinian’s text does not just propose, but, rather, performs relational subjectivity. Here, not only are the authors directly speaking to each other and to us, but what and who they are is created and informed by this process of relationality, thus creating a work that “has multiple centers of gravity.” These centers include investigations into the relationship between sexuality and violence; power and desire; humans and nature; politics of the self and other; friendship; and “compassion and animal exhaustion (death).” Here, life as a journey down a “wide road” does not circumscribe, but radiates out. Read more...

ROBIN ELIZABETH SAMPSON for WE WHO ARE ABOUT TO DIE (March 8, 2011): Every now and then, a book does more than just let me read it. It gets my attention from afar, beckons, then makes me wait. When it finally is with me, sometimes I just hold it, turning it over and over, thumbing through and just looking at it in wonder. Why measure desire? When I read, I savor, letting the words be not a grocery store check-out-rack candy bar, but a handmade truffle, sweet and bitter and luscious. A sensual and erotic experience. That’s The Wide Road by Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinia. Read more...

TARPAULIN SKY (February 27, 2011): We're pretty sure that no one needs us to say "run out and buy this book." Newsflash: TSky gives thumbs up to the work of Harryman and Hejinian. So what we'd like to say instead is this: The Wide Road could have been printed on a thirty-dollar HP and bound with rubber bands and tape, and the text still would be great, but what makes this particular edition a joy to hold is the design by HR Hegnauer, incorporating cover art by Nancy Blum. With a 7"x8" trim size, 148 pages of creamy, heavyweight paper, generous 1.5" margins, and even pumpkin-colored endpapers!, this is the kind of book that reminds you why all is not lost for the medium. Seeing that it was printed under the guidelines of the Green Press Initiative just makes the feeling that much more snuggly. Kudos to Blum, Hegnauer, and Belladonna for a thoughtful and pleasing design befitting the work of Harryman and Hejinian. Brill, brill, and brill.

BOOK RELEASE & READING
December 14, 2010
Dixon Place, New York, NY
Photography by Lawrence Schwartzwald

REBECCA BROWN:
A Narrow Road and Wide: a response to The Wide Road by Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian
...Three centuries after Basho walked his narrow road, our women went together on a wide one and the things they saw and did and said they saw and did and said and give to us. If Basho was an old man on a measured walk through mountains, temples woods, then Harryman/Hejinian are explosive, vital, two-as-one but greater than the parts. Beloved friends, companions, buoyant weights that hold each other up and help each other ride. They balance and bounce, and hold and swing (the way you swung when you were young, a girl with arms out straight and holding tight to someone else, around, around, ‘til dizzy, spinning, gleeful, radiant, glad) and the air that moves around them moves in us.
Their wide road is fe+male (male plus) holding multitudes, inviting, flirting, welcoming. A girl gang (not a mean one — a nice one) sharing lipstick, chocolate, happy hours, tips (who’s hot and who is not, whom to avoid and whom to seek and how). Delicious secrets whispered late in a bar with cigarettes and booze. Condolences and confidences: help....
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MARIA DAMON
My Sister/Mysteries, Exegetes’ Delight
A thin, flexible wand segmented by dehiscences arcs subtly across the upper part of the cover of my book. I mean, the book that Rachel Levitsky sent me and hence is mine; not that I wrote it. It’s The Wide Road, by Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian, two poetry megababe superstar coolio ladies. At first this wand is a bone, knuckled, burled and jointed. Or is it, or is it...
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NADA GORDON
The Wide Road is a plethora, o’erbrimming with peregrinations, penseés, epistles, and erotic passion: “Our very abundance has made us unsafe.” It’s cinematic like a long dream you make yourself stay asleep for to keep experiencing it, and no sooner does it settle into some groove when it switches, looks back at itself, nestles inside its own omphalos. “What a strange pastoral landscape our picaresque buddy-being wanders in.” The companionable explorations of these dual fine minds call everything into question. The chemical excitement of that question state lights up ganglia hitherto uncharged. The Wide Road reminds me of haibun in how it expaaaands into prose and contracts into verse: it inverts & subverts Basho. The road might be made of Astroturf onto which are rolled out a number of female infants, born, terrifyingly enough, with all their (our) eggs. “We feel sickened by biology.” From there, we just have to crawl along in fullest sensuality (“rouging droplets shimmy on our skin”), discovering things as we go with our mouths, our vaginas, our minds. The Wide Road creates/records the journey, in the way that “love opens life’s warm seams.” It is a kind of spell: “To live in a disenchanted world is to live at a dead end. In the Wide Road ‘we’ finds enchantments.” All I want to do is read this book in a fit of languor.

CARLA HARRYMAN is the author of twelve books of poetry, prose plays, and essays, most recently the Essay Press publication Adorno’s Noise, two experimental novels, Gardener of Stars (2001) and The Words: after Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories and Jean-Paul Sartre (1999). Harryman teaches in the Department of English at Eastern Michigan University and is on the faculty of the Milton Avery School of the Arts Graduate Program at Bard College.

Carla Harryman is also the author of OPEN BOX (IMPROVISATIONS) (Belladonna*, 2007).

 

 

 

LYN HEJINIAN was born in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1941. Poet, essayist, and translator, she is also the author or co-author of several books of poetry, including Saga/Circus (Omnidawn Publishing, 2008), The Fatalist (2003), My Life in the Nineties (Shark, 2003), and A Border Comedy (2001). She lives in Berkeley, California.