Limbinal: Rose and the Archipelago of Shifting Memories

Limbinal, as its hybrid title suggests, speaks in the porous space between a limb’s articulations and a liminal border. Formally diverse, the pieces in Limbinal intersect prose fragments with incantatory dialogues, poetic footnotes with photographic phrases, rebellious translations with liquid transpositions.

Against a backdrop of globalization fantasies heralding the new utopia, the fallout of nationalistic impulses, conflicts repeatedly arising out of rigid entrenchment, and the increasingly hazy distinction between public and private, voices struggle to cross, to intersect, to overlap. It is the permeable spaces arising between these voices that matter. Here, linguistic limbs fold and migrate, a distant border politicks and trips over the horizon, a river overflows, floods, palimpsests another river, Arendt’s responsibility touches Deleuze’s fold, the body, changeable, restless, searches for resonances.

New translations of Paul Celan’s Romanian poems become a generative field of language that sprout other limbs and broach other thresholds. A voice intimately addresses the border while multilingual subjectivities tackle radical responses. So the mouth, possibly hungering, possibly melodic, is always present, ready to disarticulate in order to articulate before the city gates, wobbly with struggle.