Death Text Book

by Jim Leftwich. 2003. Xtant books. Jim Leftwich, 1512 Mountainside Ct., Charlottesville, VA, 22903-9707.

Book Review by Michael Basinski

Someone enters who might be a reader. There are these pages of color images of women in bikinis, provocative, erotic. And they are wearing and merging, emerging from the letters. So it is Eros that pulls me to the page and I read with that arrow in my heart and Leftwich creates a communion of language and image, with metaphors of hieroglyphs and petroglyphs and texts layered upon created and found text, juxtaposing meaning upon meaning, Eve and Gilgamesh and this horrible American fiasco in Iran, in that place of our original sexual sin energy. And what is wonderful about this text is that the text is not obliterated but coaxes with enough meaning to force a reading, an enter-gizing not by meaning but by imagination. Jim Leftwich, I am happy to see that he has leaped to yet another other place. I’m comin, I’ll be there. Come-on. Let’s leap.