Discipline

By Dawn Lundy Martin and Fanny Howe

This stunning second collection engages the "disciplines" associated with regimes of powers and sadomasochism. The work interrogates the social and linguistic space between regimes of power enacted on the body, and thereby the soul.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nightboat Books
• Release date: Mar 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9781643620534

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DISCIPLINE

DISCIPLINE

DAWN LUNDY MARTIN

NIGHTBOAT BOOKS

CALLICOON, NEW YORK

Foreword

In his introduction to Bottom Dogs by Edward Dahlberg, DH Lawrence writes: What the young feel intensely, and no longer so secretly, is the extreme repulsiveness of other people. He wrote this in 1929 in the wake of the Great Depression and ascribed this condition to an erosion of mutual sympathy among American citizens after decades of exploitation and violence directed towards the earth and others.

This many years later, his words evoke our nation now. How can artists respond to the loathing that trickles down to the youngest of the young? In the case of Discipline, the poet responds directly and personally, discovering the larger trauma in the materials of her own life. She is heroic because of her refusal to hide or escape from a single, fatal moment. Like Antigone. This is her mission. It is a modern story, composed in the frenzy of potential suicide and agitated despair. She makes her path straight by her continual running back and forth, carrying her outrage.

You can remember, reading this book, the nausea once identified by Sartre and certainly by Dahlberg. This nausea has