Lucy Ives

An energetic, witty collection of stories where the supernatural meets the anomalies of everyday life--deception, infidelity, lost cats, cute memes, amateur pornography, and more. A woman walks onto a tennis court. A woman has a conversation with a friend's husband in a supermarket. A woman sees a painting at the home of an art collector. A woman goes on a run. A woman takes videos of a cat in a bodega. A woman answers a Craigslist ad to write erotic diaries for money. Cosmogony takes accounts of so-called normal life and mines them for inconsistencies, cruelties, deceptions, and delights. Incorporating a virtuosic range of styles and genres (Wikipedia entry, phone call, math equation, encounters with the supernatural, philosophies of time travel), these stories reveal how the narratives we tell ourselves and believe are inevitably constructed, offering a glimpse of the structures that underlie and apparently determine human existence--and which we ignore at our own peril.

Stories

Cosmogony

Stella Krakus, a curator at Manhattan's renowned Central Museum of Art, is having the roughest week ever. Everything is going wrong, including the fact a beloved colleague, Paul, has gone missing. Strange things are afoot; it's almost more than she can overanalyse. But the appearance of a strange map, depicting a mysterious 19th-century utopian settlement, sends Stella on an all-consuming research mission where she discovers the unbearable secret that Paul's been keeping, and charts a course out of the chaos of her own life.

Impossible Views of the World

A virtuosic, radical reimagining of the systems novel by a “rampaging, mirthful genius” (Elizabeth McKenzie). Everything that happened was repetition. But it was repetition with a difference. So she dragged along in a spiral, trusting to this form. Manhattan, 2014. It’s an unseasonably warm Thursday in November and Erin Adamo is locked out of her apartment. Her husband has just left her and meanwhile her keys are in her coat, which she abandoned at her parents’ apartment when she exited mid-dinner after her father—once again—lost control. Erin takes refuge in the library of the university where she is a grad student. Her bag contains two manuscripts she’s written, along with a monograph by a faculty member who’s recently become embroiled in a bizarre scandal. Erin isn’t sure what she’s doing, but a small, mostly unconscious part of her knows: within these documents is a key she’s needed all along. With unflinching precision, Life Is Everywhere captures emotional events that hover fitfully at the borders of visibility and intelligibility, showing how the past lives on, often secretly and at the expense of the present. It’s about one person on one evening, reckoning with heartbreak—a story that, to be fully told, unexpectedly requires many others, from the history of botulism to an enigmatic surrealist prank. Multifarious, mischievous, and deeply humane, Lucy Ives’s latest masterpiece rejoices in what a novel, and a self, can carry.

A Novel

Life Is Everywhere

This New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, is "hilarious . . . a riotous success. Equal parts campus novel, buddy comedy and meditation on art-making under late capitalism, the novel is a hugely funny portrait of an egomaniac and his nebbish best friend" (The Washington Post). It’s the end of summer 2003. George W. Bush has recently declared the mission in Iraq accomplished, the unemployment rate is at its highest in years, and Martha Stewart has just been indicted for insider trading. Meanwhile, somewhere in the Midwest, Troy Augustus Loudermilk (fair-haired, statuesque, charismatic) and his companion Harry Rego (definitely none of those things) step out of a silver Land Cruiser and onto the campus of The Seminars, America’s most prestigious creative writing program, to which Loudermilk has recently been accepted for his excellence in poetry. Loudermilk, however, has never written a poem in his life. Wickedly entertaining, beguiling, layered, and sly, Loudermilk is a social novel for our time: a comedy of errors that deftly examines class, gender, and inheritance, and subverts our pieties about literature, authorship, art making, and the institutions that sustain them.

Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World

Loudermilk

Poetry. Essays. ORANGE ROSES, written over a 10-year timeframe, enacts a poet's development: the process of her discovering what a poem might be. In this work, there is hardly a difference between dream and reality—the line between that which exists and that which is merely a construction of perspective is blurred in any attempt to portray a given experience. Ives questions not only what we can get away with, in attempting to add to or alter whatever "poetry" or "literature" might officially be—but, too, what will we be able to take away? Writing is less about choosing between worlds, she suggests in this exploratory book, than it is about existing in one where life and our perceptions thereof are complementary.

Orange Roses

Poetry. "Poem. Novel. Essay. Here is a literary triptych whose panels swing from one another unfettered by geometry in wide and wild arcs. But there are hinges. Think of the upkeep of the minotaur at the center of what can only be the labyrinthine mind of Lucy Ives. This particular creature feeds on its own enclosure. Who said time is eternity turned into a moving image? How does this work on the page? As soon as Ives allows things focus, she pulls back, revealing a small component of a larger construct, but never anything objective and irreducibly whole. Thus, effectively her subject and obsession is not the demarcation of time, but the inability of time to be properly or comparatively enacted. What if Stein and Paul Éluard were a single poet? What if Wittgenstein, Elaine Scarry, and Charles and Ray Eames collaborated on a novelization of Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits? What if Robbe-Grillet and Hélène Cixous were to re-write the Duino Elegies as an essay? Daedalus never built anything quite like this. Good luck getting out."—Noah Eli Gordon

The Worldkillers

Anamnesis is a book-length poem that incorporates the process of revision into its progression. Beginning with the statement, We can write, the poem explores the possibility of poetic narrative as constructed from statements linked not to forward-tending narration, but rather dedicated to the eventual substitution, reformation, or even crossing out of earlier lines. In Anamnesis, the forward movement of writing or telling is accomplished only by correction, in other words, by return. If such corrections finally become demonstrative in their own right, it is because the accrual of fragments forms a kind of narrative of the authors life:I am ten years old and my fathers face turns inside its hat and collarAcross a ski slopeThe trees are black in snowIt muffles everythingCross this outWrite, I jumped off a wall when I was sixWrite, I fell on the blade of an ice skateCross this outI was nineDriven by doubt in the effectiveness of linguistic description as we normally know it, Anamnesis is a poem about recollectionthough it is also concerned with the Platonic origin of the title word and with the possibility of knowledge that may inhere even in a state of unknowing.

A Poem

Anamnesis

A superbly made hybrid photobook on the stories that objects invite us to tell In July of 2017, photographer Matthew Connors (born 1976) and novelist and critic Lucy Ives (born 1980) embarked on a strange project: to remove and catalog all the contents of Connors's car, a 1992 Volvo 240 station wagon. Although the New York-based duo began the endeavor without knowing where it would lead, their investigation--of parts, tools, ephemera, litter, personal items, unidentifiable disjecta, among other objects--lasted more than two years and resulted in a series of photographs by Connors and an essay by Ives on narrative forms and temporalities inherent to contemporary media. This collaborative publication, designed by Elana Schlenker, poses questions about where narrative originates and how we establish our stories in relation to the objects and timescales that carry, ground and surround us.

The Poetics

Loose Joints is proud to present 'Living Trust', the first monograph by American artist Buck Ellison. LA-based Ellison?s work broadly investigates the language of privilege through meticulously researched images, often executed through staged settings and performative interventions into the visual language of photography.0On the surface, many of Ellison's images appear to mildly reproduce the habits and tastes of comfortable, white, upper-middle-class families: organic vegetables, wellness therapies, performance sportswear, lacrosse & rowing, family Christmas card portraits. However, lurking beneath this is a deep network of enquiry into how whiteness and privilege are sustained and broadcast, whether it is what you put in your body, the bumper sticker on your car, which health problems you can afford to worry about or the quality of the air you breathe.0Many images in 'Living Trust' use a recipe of carefully constructed scenarios to question how photography perpetuates these distinctions. Ellison pays actors and models throughout his work to stand in and take on the appearance of generic characters, at times reminiscent of commercial or advertising tropes. In this breaking down of boundaries between different rules of photography, Ellison's work goes beyond a fetishism or repudiation of wealthy habits, in favour of something more ambivalent and uncomfortable. Through webs of association stretching across various photographic styles, 0'Living Trust' is an anthropology of W.A.S.P. America ? where the quest for authenticity and well-being is aestheticised, internalised and commodified.

Buck Ellison, Living Trust

Lucy Ives s novella "nineties" is a portrait of teenage friends navigating Manhattan s privileged class in an era of excess. Against the backdrop of a New York City private school during the 1990s, three girls steal a credit card for a gratuitous one-day shopping spree. As they traverse a world shaped by luxury and face temptations that for better or worse instruct their movement toward adulthood, the girls experience the tension of burgeoning sexuality and the thrill of testing moral boundaries. "nineties" is the strange and subtle story of selfishness, materialism, and confusion during the unique and fleeting moment when girls near the end of girlhood."

Nineties

Thoughts concerning art and experience by layering in one volume, the poet's fragments of dreams, lists, games, conversations, poems, and excerpts from notebooks, as a way of looking into the writing practice

Lucy Ives

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