LA ALBA: N.H. PRITCHARD + IMA-ABASI OKON + K.R.M. MOONEY + NAT RAHA

Within the visual arrangement of the page and by slight shifts in spelling and tonal values, “LA ALBA'' defies the frames of coherence that affect experience and its expression. Taking N.H. PRICHARD’s poems THE VOICE and LA ALBA as a starting point, the contributions deal with a symbolic resistance to legibility by employing abstraction and elements of concrete and sound poetry such as extreme typographical dilation, the splicing of words, unconventional spacing and punctuation. IMA-ABASI-OKON delves into song composition and recurs to seriality to set a steady repetition that falls down the pages emphasising gutters and margins.This is a commitment to Pritchard’s idea that “words are ancillary to content” and to the squeezing out of sound from lyrics. Heat, steel, neodymium and bisphenol a (an xenoestrogen) are the actors in K. R. M. MOONEY’s thermographic prints. The physical process of applying heat across the paper with his hand brings rise to the properties below its surface and a movement that produces variation in tonal values that again recalls Pritchard’s poem LA ALBA. (“sunrise” in English). In the poem, Pritchard not only invokes dawn's cloak of heat but also reproduces the horizon’s vastness by stretching the words in such a way that the reader experiences its extension and the effect of light on it. NAT RAHA’s poems set in motion different speeds of reading that collapse standard linguistic and visual perception. Superimposed stacks of text accumulate political urges prompting a fast reading; additionally, words are slowed down and dilated in concentric circles.