Echolalia in Script:
A Collection of Asemic Writingby Sam Roxas-Chua 姚
104 pp. / paper / $20.00
Orison Books
ISBN: 978-0-9964397-4-9
Distributed to the trade by Itasca Books
1-800-901-3480 / orders@itascabooks.com
Publication Date: December 5, 2017
ABOUT THE BOOK
There are some words I believe we will never have words for. That’s asemic to me. A made-up script that is alive, an inner frequency.
–Sam Roxas-Chua 姚
Echolalia in Script is a truly original marriage of visual art and poetry. Lines of Roxas-Chua 姚’s poetry are paired with his arresting asemic visual works—artwork that imitates and plays with the idea of script, but which is a purely visual language. Asemic writing is a meditative process for Roxas-Chua 姚, and these images entrance, enrapture, and invite contemplation.
PRAISE FOR ECHOLALIA IN SCRIPT
Echolalia in Script is a book of elemental, angelic, visionary beauty rendered in the illimitable shorthand of the divine, an austere infinite tracery, a singing Forever composed of untranslatable Nows.
–Dante Di Stefano, the Best American Poetry blog
In the wake of such trauma as the severance of family bonds—abandonment in the case of orphans, enforced separation in the case of the two thousand migrant children—one can hope that over time the traumatized child can develop language—through word or gesture—to express the experience of loss, to articulate the grief of rupture, so that some new knowledge or meaning might emerge from the wreckage. Through these two lyrical and haunting books [Echolalia in Script and Saying Your Name Three Times Underwater], Roxas-Chua 姚 claims space for this kind of expression, drawing from his own complicated, fragmented experiences to shape a new kind of language—one that does not deny the fissures, but transcends them.
–Mary-Kim Arnold, The Georgia Review
The first time I met Sam Roxas-Chua 姚 he invited me to view the nests he’d made of chewed poems. Perhaps a year later he told me that he swam in a vat of pulp to understand the life of paper. And one night he photographed wet Oregon pavement and through his lens transformed soaked sidewalks into Chinese silk panels. Everything Sam does is unscripted. Everything he does is exquisite. His collection of asemic writing, Echolalia in Script, is sublime.
–Sandra Alcosser, author of Except by Nature and Sleeping Inside the Glacier
Here is writing that is entirely open to the world, a poetry that generously refuses to delimit the human experience or accept only what is known. While it may be defined as “asemic writing,” such definition sterilizes what we have before us: a poetry that precedes language, a personally rhythmic grammar that plays among the tools of expression, and explores the outer boundaries of the rational as it searches for connection. In today’s literary climate, Echolalia in Script is refreshingly, breathtakingly transcendent.
–Michael Wiegers, Executive Editor, Copper Canyon Press
Sam Roxas-Chua 姚’s gorgeous collection of asemic writings, Echolalia in Script, presents his gestural inscriptions as they move elegantly over the page as delicately as lyrical strands of light snaking and doubling across the surfaces of a wind-lit mountain lake. Indeed, here lies one whose imagination is writ on water . . . in all of its meditative beauty, deep soul-solace, and artistic resolve!
–David St. John, recipient of the Rome Fellowship & the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters
In this elegant dance between language and image Sam Roxas-Chua 姚 at once intensifies and transcends the capacity of marks on the page to make meaning. With every line and brush stroke in this stunning volume Roxas-Chua 姚 reminds us of the sheer childlike joy of putting ink to paper, and underscores the power and universality of this primal human act. This is a book to behold and marvel at, not just to read.
–Valerie Laken, author of Separate Kingdom and Dream House
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sam Roxas-Chua 姚 is a poet and visual artist living in Eugene, Oregon. He is the owner of The Poetry Loft, a small business dedicated to community writing workshops and the promotion of poets and writers. Roxas-Chua 姚 holds an MFA from Pacific University. A chapbook of his poems, Fawn Language, was published by Tebot Bach in 2013, and a full-length collection, Saying Your Name Three Times Underwater, was released by Lithic Press in 2017.