TOUT VA BIEN (Displaced, 2012)
“Suzanne Stein’s TOUT VA BIEN extends its process of structural interventions in social, discursive, and lyric space with a “51rst” poetic activity: it is being distributed for free through SPD. In a register related to her longtime work as Bay Area publisher (of “free” chapbooks), and her day labor as community producer for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, TOUT VA BIEN collects a series of talks, lyrics, performances, and related documents that punch a “hole in space” and time. The cross-coast 1980 artwork by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz (HOLE IN SPACE), which linked storefronts and their passersby in New York and Los Angeles via satellite, with astonishing results, is the signal backdrop for “the poet’s body as a public communication sculpture” (Alli Warren). If David Antin, Hannah Wilke, and Sherrie Levine reinvented the happening for a 21rst century political art-in-language: The girl with the gun is that asks it.”
“[T]here’s some conceptual-sounding “tricks” to this book that you might hear about first, i.e., it’s sold at a price of “free,” and it reproduces a Donald Judd essay precisely (somewhat enacting the famous Borges story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote “). But it’s on my list as much for the “straight” poetry sections, where Stein sounds and thinks like no one I can think of—rigorous yet dreamy, probing yet reflexive.” —Brent Cunningham
“…more essay-like than some books of poetics, it is more performative than many performance artists and it is more conceptual than the Conceptualists.” —Laura Moriarty
From TOUT VA BIEN:
“I wanted to write a book that would—not perform—but function, one that would build a more humane being while that being read.”