Chora

Sandra Doller

Sandra Doller’s tricky, sly language comes at you sideways, full of coinages and puns, and is obsessed with lines: the highways and train tracks that cross deserts; lines from jokes and ghost stories; and lines of influence—Gertrude Stein implicitly and H.D. explicitly. Doller is not concerned with the complete or the perfect: she shows us the torn edge of notebook paper, “the american wastrel” in a yellow dress, and characters who plead, in a reversal of Goethe’s last words, for “no more light.”

“Intrepid Sandra Doller takes a train (hitchhikes) through the (mined) (mind of the) world, armed only with a spare language (think child’s primer, Gertrude Stein, ballads, pillow talk). Quick hits and shifts, the eye blinks and a different vista appears just as mysteriously as it hightails it into another landscape of the discontinuous present. Eros infuses the ordinary, makes it ‘wake up in make up.’ Sing song memories drift in and out. It’s about living a sensual life (mind) in prickly America. The music is as sharp as a knife pressed tenderly against the sun’s throat, as sweet and no-nonsense tough as the ‘core body of the girl with a yellow dress on . . . ’” —John Yau

“Chora plays synaesthetic musics, grows margins of vines. Her lines bring forth notes, an exacting, disjunct polyphonics, new music from out ‘silence.’ A how-to book of having hands, eyes, mind, a breathing body. Read aloud, a spirit level. It makes me want to know you.”—Lee Ann Brown