Alphabet Theater
Performance and Mixed-Media Poetry
"Alphabet Theater … shares an intense, ecstatic approach to the sonic body of language. Her syncretic, deeply ethical vision takes in etymology, ritual practices and practical politics." (Wesleyan).
A mixed-media tour de force, Alphabet Theater breaks open the page to extend poetic practice into the realms of visual art and performance. Its complex and innovative format layers poetry, video stills, drawing and collages in pieces that range from performance art to opera and political theater.
Intelligent, emotionally engaging multi-media performance poetry.
“Meredith Stricker “moves to transpose the search for a new poetic language to the living sphere.”
– Cecelia Vicuña
“The past is reworked as ancestral languages and new languages meet. For Stricker, the linguistic search becomes an effort to regain all of our losses, 'the bee hum of all languages.'"
– The Village Voice
In Stricker’s Alphabet Theater, language acts, interacts and activates. Giving body to hives and highways, weather and war, her poems perform the co-arising of word and world and ask how to begin our liberation from force."
– Adalaide Morris
"Alphabet Theatre projects an overarching coherence reminiscent of William Carlos Williams Patterson or the late books of HD. Stricker shares with those authors an intense ecstatic approach to the sonic body of language...
Given the scope of her concerns and the trans-generic inventiveness of her compositions one may expect the book to engage readers interested not only in poetry, but also feminist poetics, performance art, media studies and perhaps even linguistics ...
I feel strongly that Stricker's is a singular and significant voice with an important contribution to make to American poetry."
– Reader's report on Alphabet Theater for Wesleyan University Press