Swoon.
Granary Books, 2001. Item #GB_102
ISBN: 9781887123549
6 x 8 in., 328 pp., smyth-sewn in wrappers.
Swoon is the true story of two writers who meet and fall in love over the Internet. Culled from more than 5000 pages of e-mail, postcards, and letters, it is documentary, love story, poetry, erotica, collaborative essay, and auto- (or duo-) biography all rolled into one.
Beginning in the fall of 1998, the poet Nada Gordon, then living in Tokyo, and poet/cartoonist Gary Sullivan, who’d moved to New York the previous year, began a daily correspondence that culminated in April of 1999 with Gordon’s return to the United States after 11 years in Japan. Prior to ever meeting, the couple produced and exchanged thousands of pages of letters, poems, anecdotes, theoretical musings, gossip, bibliomancy—anything and everything to keep their connection open and abuzz despite being halfway across the globe from each other.
Written almost inadvertently, Swoon documents the tenacity of love, and shows how, like a species of prehistoric insect that continues to crawl among us, it survives with language as its host even in inhospitable conditions. Disclosures open to further disclosures, and their correspondence morphs into ardent multiform verses, resulting in a truly dialogic exchange that renders void any distinctions between art and life. Swoon is like Heloise and Abelard without tragedy, the troubadours without inequality, and the Brownings without euphemism—all facilitated by the immediate intimacy of cybercommunication.
This is from an edition of 1000 copies in wrappers. As new.
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ABOUT GARY SULLIVAN
ABOUT NADA GORDON
Further reading: Zaleski, Jeff. "…and a Love Connection." Publishers Weekly 87.
Price: $17.95