UFOs, Time Travel, and Revolution—Isabel Waidner’s Raucous, Raging Sterling Karat Gold for 4Columns

I love Waidner’s book, for a zillion reasons but also because they claw back experimental writing for the BIPOC working class, for immigrants, for cleaners, for those who aren’t supposed to read or be represented in it and because they see experimental writing’s possibility to create change…

“What I find profound is the humor and joy in all of this, even as the writing exposes patriarchy and suggests strategies o subvert it. In English, sentences with their beginnings, middles, and ends come carrying progress. So, too, most novels with plots moving on to a resolution. Waidner explodes those expectations from the sentence up. Their truncated speech and time-traveling narrative refuse the dictates of Western time and all its assumptions of capitalism and conquering. “A foible [is] something that catches,” Waidner writes, “that you may get caught up in . . . doing similar symbolic work, see?” Reading this at a time when late capitalism feels difficult to resist, when it feels like there are few ways to fight back against the cataclysm of our contemporary reality, I love how that sentence ends on a question, a direction for how we can find our own symbolic work.” Read more at 4Columns.