Overview

Leave to Remain is a faux spy-novel possessed by the spirit of Janus: doubleness, duplicity, double-entendres, two-facedness, bridges and doorways-as is only appropriate for a work composed by two writers: one French, one American. Two-faced Janus resurrects into a time-traveling adventure, a tour of double-agents, double-speak, and double-dealings. In their earlier hybrid essay, A Prank of Georges (2010), Thalia Field and Abigail Lang returned us to ""the primal force of language: naming"" (Susan Howe). In Leave to Remain, a weathered Janus pursues an elusive quest, responding to a world of war, traitors, translations, and the slippery personal and political terrain between friends and enemies. This silly and deadly serious fiction-essay aims at nothing less than a full inquiry into how monstrous we are when we define loyalties and defend definitions, and how we are all double-agents seeking meaning and intelligence. Unafraid of being both timeless and timely, Leave to Remain challenges the reader to play in the world of folded imagery and language.

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9781628972849

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Reviews

"""Thalia Field's powers and preoccupations ... make for poignant, compelling reading that is equal parts cerebral, mythical, vulnerable and political.""-- ""The Believer"" ""Thalia Field's poetry is mesmerizing, complex, and stands on its own with original forms.""-- ""The Bloomsbury Review"" ""In A Prank of Georges, Abigail Lang and Thalia Field create a dazzling set of variations in, about, and around lines from Gertrude Stein. Stein's lines become threads with which Lang and Field weave a text heterelingual and ludic, in which the play of names becomes a matter of meaning's performing. The question here is not what the poem says but how it keeps on keeps on saying.""-- ""Charles Bernstein"" For William Carlos Williams a poem is a small or large machine made out of words. Thalia Field and Abigail lang have taken this proposition seriously, yet playfully. Their luminous pas de deux ludically conjures Gertrude Stein to construct a textual game that leaps linguistic and cultural rifts to find the commonalities of 'various sorts of talk' through which ""the name is spread from link to link as if by a chain."" Together these writings return us to the primal force of language: naming.-- ""Susan Howe"" ""Thalia Field's curiosity and probe is infectious, tantalizing, irrepressible. She is one of our most startling, original younger writers.""-- ""Anne Waldman, author of Manatee/Humanity"""

Thalia Field's poetry is mesmerizing, complex, and stands on its own with original forms. --The Bloomsbury Review Thalia Field's powers and preoccupations...make for poignant, compelling reading that is equal parts cerebral, mythical, vulnerable and political. --The Believer For William Carlos Williams a poem is a small or large machine made out of words. Thalia Field and Abigail lang have taken this proposition seriously, yet playfully. Their luminous pas de deux ludically conjures Gertrude Stein to construct a textual game tht leaps linguistic and cultural rifts to find the commonalities of 'various sorts of talk' through which the name is spread from link to link as if by a chain. Together these writings return us to the primal force of language: naming. --Susan Howe In A Prank of Georges, Abigail Lang and Thalia Field create a dazzling set of variations in, about, and around lines from Gertrude Stein. Stein's lines become threads with which Lang and Field weave a text heterelingual and ludic, in which the play of names becomes a matter of meaning's performing. The question here is not what the poem says but how it keeps on keeps on saying. --Charles Bernstein Thalia Field's curiosity and probe is infectious, tantalizing, irrepressible. She is one of our most startling, original younger writers. --Anne Waldman, author of Manatee/Humanity

Thalia Field's poetry is mesmerizing, complex, and stands on its own with original forms. -- The Bloomsbury Review Thalia Field's powers and preoccupations ... make for poignant, compelling reading that is equal parts cerebral, mythical, vulnerable and political. -- The Believer Thalia Field's curiosity and probe is infectious, tantalizing, irrepressible. She is one of our most startling, original younger writers. -- Anne Waldman, author of Manatee/Humanity For William Carlos Williams a poem is a small or large machine made out of words. Thalia Field and Abigail lang have taken this proposition seriously, yet playfully. Their luminous pas de deux ludically conjures Gertrude Stein to construct a textual game that leaps linguistic and cultural rifts to find the commonalities of 'various sorts of talk' through which the name is spread from link to link as if by a chain. Together these writings return us to the primal force of language: naming.-- Susan Howe In A Prank of Georges, Abigail Lang and Thalia Field create a dazzling set of variations in, about, and around lines from Gertrude Stein. Stein's lines become threads with which Lang and Field weave a text heterelingual and ludic, in which the play of names becomes a matter of meaning's performing. The question here is not what the poem says but how it keeps on keeps on saying.-- Charles Bernstein

Author Information

Thalia Field is the author of Point and Line, Incarnate: Story Material, ULULU, Bird Loves, Backyard, and, with Abigail Lang, A Prank of Georges. She teaches in the Literary Arts department of Brown University and lives in Providence, Rhode Island. Abigail Lang is the author of Le monde compte rendu: Lectures de Louis Zukofsky and the co-editor of Double Change, A Film Archive of Poetry, 1 and 2. She also translates American poetry into French and teaches at the University of Paris–Diderot.

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