Press for SOFF
Too much work and still to be poets. a REPOPORT on the Re-Thinking Poetics Conference by Stephanie Young, including some commentary on Statment of Facts and a response from Marjorie Perloff, June 2010.How to do silence: a conversation with Vanessa Place by Sina Queryas on Lemon Hound, Thursday, July 29, 2010.
“… extremely disturbing on multiple levels …”
Interversation with Vanessa Place by James Wagner at Esther Press, August 3, 2010
Poetry from the Law (part 5) a review of Vanessa Place’s Tragodía 1: Statement of Facts by Steven Fama on his blog, the glade of theoric ornithic hermetica, August 15, 2010.
“No poetry book this year will be more disturbing – upsetting, unsettling – to read than Tragodía 1: Statement of Facts, by Vanessa Place.”
Vanessa Place Statement of Facts at Supernumerary, October 5, 2010.
“The text doesn’t really present itself, does it?”
Interview: Vanessa Place, lawyer and performing poet. by Susan Mansfield at Living Scotsman, November 10, 2010.
“As a lawyer, Vanessa Place defends sex offenders, some of society’s most hated criminals. As a performing poet, she reads verbatim the harrowing experiences of her cases’ victims. It’s a combination that doesn’t always go well with her audiences.”
Arduity: Conceptualist verse. by John Armstrong.
“Statement of Facts is a powerful poem which forces us to question our own response to ‘documentary’ material and the nature and reliability of evidence. There’s also for me the way that language functions (and often lies) in response to our attempts to make sense of things and I’m grateful to Place for bringing this to my attention.”
Statement of Facts by Vanessa Place (Blanc Press, 2010) Review by Andrea Quaid. Lana Turner Journal. 2010.
“Place’s Statement of Facts raises provocation to a new level. … Place demands that readers consider their own reasons for engaging with the work and the implications of those choices.”
Looking at Blindness: The Double Ascendancy of Conceptual Art and Writing by Jen Graves, art critic for The Stranger. American Book Review. Volume 32, Number 4, May/June 2011.
“In Place’s collection of appellate briefs, voices intersect and collide with only systematic attribution. This is a form of public sculpture, built around an interior that can only be obsessively circumnavigated.”
Poetics of Guilt by Anna Moschovakis. American Book Review. Volume 32, Number 4, May/June 2011.
“Statement of Facts is not only conceptual poetry written by a writer-slash-appellate attorney. These are appellate briefs written—the old-fashioned way—by a poet. They employ the techniques of assonance, repetition, anaphora. There are moments of literary resonance that seem almost to subordinate content to the pleasurable effect of some pitch-perfect irony, a subtly timed echo, a good last line.While a description of Statement of Facts may do a lot of the work’s work, this is a book to be read, not just to know about.
Whether [Statement of Facts] succeeds as poetry is only as important as the question of what poetry is.”