Isle of the Signatories

“Public inscriptions are all around us. Their mystery and the lack thereof are the off-screen subject of Marjorie Welish’s gritty, beguiling Isle of the Signatories, to be pondered long after lesser inscriptions have given up their secrets.”—John Ashbery In her latest collection, Marjorie Welish invents a world of public inscriptions. From graffiti to scholarly dedication and from historical placards to words etched in granite, she employs a variety of fonts to explore the dangers of rhetoric, the mysteries of coded language, the enigmas of form, the powerful gift of dedication, and the strange sense and substance of both new and dying literary conventions. Are all contingencies still in effect? Okay Okay Okay Of or referring to antecedent future sentences in creases: as, insofar as, even as, yes! Of which antecedent future increasing salvage do we write? Recipient of the Judith E. Wilson Fellowship, the Howard Foundation Fellowship, and other prestigious awards for poetry, Marjorie Welish is the author of Word Group, most recently, and also The Annotated “Here” and Selected Poems, which was an Academy of American Poets Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize finalist and a Village Voice Best Book of the Year. She lives in New York and teaches at Columbia University and Pratt Institute.