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Size: 14.5 x 21 CM
PRESENT CONTINUOUS is a collection of hybrid essays, written during the recent covid pandemic, moving between criticism and poetic prose, between visual and textual expressions of the present moment and a future that still has a past to resolve. From the initial announcement of the lockdown to Black Lives Matter protests to a “second wave” of restrictions and the issue of police violence, Grundy’s writing offers, in the words of Richard Owens, “a quality, a shade of incredible intelligence and intuitive imagining that cannot be reproduced”.
"The world in art and poetry will begin with a world anew", commented the late musician and poet Henry Grimes. In these "expositions of harmony and theory", David Grundy strives to imagine that new world.
David Grundy is a poet and scholar based in London. He is the author of A True Account (The 87 Press, 2023), and A Black Arts Poetry Machine: Amiri Baraka and the Umbra Poets (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) and co-editor, with Lauri Scheyer, of Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton (Wesleyan University Press, 2023). He co-runs the small press Materials/Materialien.
David Grundy l PRESENT CONTINUOUS
Here and now, I’m learning much about writing as it can be the exposition of harmony and theory. From now into the future, I will have the inspiring things you wrote to envision and to further my understanding. The world in art and poetry will begin with a world anew. I really believe the world is getting better, and your writing is in expression of that.
— Henry Grimes
Grundy’s is an excessive and generous critical project. Many of his prose texts begin by looking at a minute formulation otherwise gone by unnoticed or unanswered, to spiral outwards into wide-ranging digressions, so as then to return to the minute textual detail – as a technique of demonstrating how wide-ranging and important that detail had been in the first place, not just to the text but to THE WORLD, in explosive compression.
— Lisa Jeschke
I am grateful to see your work move as it does and get the attention it deserves because — to be truthful — I do not know that I have ever known anyone quite as productive as you — ever — and I mean this through and through. And in the labor, the work ethos, there is a quality, a shade of incredible intelligence and intuitive imagining that cannot be reproduced without that labor. Spirit, I suppose, cannot be performed but either is or is not, and the spirit of your labor is always embedded in the thinking you share — that seamlessness that cuts across from your poetry to your prose and back again. I celebrate you for it. Truly so.
— Richard Owens