By book's end it's unclear how much she has absorbed and of that what will be lost in her wake as she leaves, but what is clear is that Ravicka and its inhabitants have at least left faint traces of themselves on her, and she in turn has at least begun to know them.

As in Samuel Delany's brilliant novel Dhalgren, the city inhabits the text, looming as large as a character in and of itself and largely defying the narrator's attempts to perceive its heart. Grappling with language and its attendant gestural formalities, she fumbles through communication barriers, sometimes connecting, sometimes not. A visitor to the troubled city of Ravicka, an outside linguist who speaks the native language, yearns to approach the heart of the place, its culture, its people in order to hold onto some thing to bring back with her, even a memory, to show where she has been and perhaps to figure out just what exactly has gone wrong. This is one of those short and dense yet paradoxically open texts that begs for rereadings as one picks up words and phrases to peer at what lurks beneath them. Perhaps a combination of the two? At times the absurdity and level of specificity in detail feels pleasantly random, though it could just as easily have been carefully plotted. She makes her home in New England with poet-ceremonialist Danielle Vogel.Having finished the first volume in Renee Gladman's Ravicka cycle, I'm alternating between thinking it was written out all at once from within a fugue state or it was painstakingly crafted word by word over a long period of time. Gladman is writing and presenting a series of talks on moving architectures, scoring invisibility, and drawing writing as part of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series. She has been awarded fellowships, artist grants, and residencies from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Lannan Foundation, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), among others. Recent essays and visual work have appeared in The Paris Review, Gulf Coast, Granta, Harper’s, BOMB magazine, e-flux, and n+1.

She is the author of thirteen published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the “Event Factory” (2010), “The Ravickians” (2011), “Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge” (2013), and “Houses of Ravicka” (2017), as well as two collections of drawings, “Prose Architectures” (2017) and “One Long Black Sentence,” a series of white ink drawings on black paper, indexed by Fred Moten (2020). Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of poetry, prose, drawing and architecture. This event is for the Carthage community only. Renee Gladman, who is currently making some of the most various and new writing in the country, will read her poetry, fiction, and non-fiction for the Visiting Writers Series at 7 p.m.

Event Factory by Renee Gladman