Description

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A combination of erasure poetry, micro fiction, and visual art, Drifting Bottles is more than a queer, contemporary, multimedia hybrid collection: it’s a deep, philosophical exploration of the world as it exists both within the author, and outside of them. In Drifting Bottles, Arden Hunter reforms, re-channels, and recirculates everything from the devastated remains of pages devoured by bookworms and plain texts, to timeless vintage, nostalgic aesthetics and technological landscapes unique to 21st century artists and designers. Fused, collaged, and rooted in the increasingly-vital, ever-evolving art of found poetry, Drifting Bottles utilizes the ruins of passing time, earthly matter, and metaphysical spaces to deliver a vibrant experimental narrative transcendent of all capitalistic and otherwise normative expectations.

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“My experience with Arden Hunter’s work is that no matter its form, it inherently invites you to ‘really admire all the details,’ and Drifting Bottles is no exception. In addition to erasure poetry that constructs a simmering new narrative from previous works of fiction and other writing, Hunter builds a paper-ephemera universe surrounding the text with a vivid landscape of collaged photographs, magazine clippings, and other snippets. The book calls upon a staggering variety of one-of-a-kind visual elements, from diagrams to nutrition facts to dictionaries, and the care given to their arrangement is apparent in the composition of each page. With the pieces each functioning as their own works of art within the larger structure of the narrative and the sparse but powerful words remaining in the erasures, I am certain I could spend a lifetime with this book and still find new details by which to be delighted. Drifting Bottles represents everything that’s exciting to me about hybrid work: it’s inventive, considered, and extremely immersive, providing the reader with a glimpse into not only the lives of those playing out on the pages, but the everyday materials that inform Hunter’s own perspective as a creator.”

— nat raum, editor-in-chief of fifth wheel press and author of preparatory school for the end of the world

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“Arden Hunter’s VISPO collection, Drifting Bottles organizes a radical, beautiful accretion of powerful colliding narrative-motifs. Using ‘bulletin boards,’ Hunter catalogues image-texts juxtaposing desire, anger, alienation, self-perception, death, transformation….

“Precisely entwined floral arrangements, business charts, scientific paraphernalia, strong-man tropes, secretarial pool line-drawings, dictionary lists and Sunday comics (etc.) are cut, drawn-over, re-shaped in heightened emotional schematics. Faded and vivid colors, redacted texts and erasures, hand-written notes, jarring associations, fractured and bold, create a whole, alternately troubling, and deeply magical, alchemical. The work’s subversive gestures accumulate revelatory arcs of patriarchal refusal, wondrously rhythmic. Performatively aware, Arden Hunter is sharing with the reader dynamic(s) of form/process mechanisms and preoccupations, opening the interrogative of visual poetry’s creative obsessions, producing new-necessary tectonic shifts.”

— Robert Frede Kenter, author of EDEN (Floodlight Editions, 2021), Publisher & Editor-in-Chief of Ice Floe Press (www.icefloepress.net)

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Interview with Time to Feed My Reads || Interview with The Poetry Question

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Arden Hunter is an aroace agender writer, artist and performer. With an eclectic range of interests from the horrific to the whimsical, the theme tying all of their work together is an inexplicable and unconditional love for the ridiculous beast that is called “human.” Find them on Twitter @hunterarden and at ardenhunter.com.