Reculer pour Mieux Sauter Volumes 2-5 is the next installment of the mixed-genre nonfiction work by poet/artist Anne-Marie Levine. The four volumes, presented in a single book, continues the artist’s interrogation of her complex and touching family history, across the century and on both sides of the Atlantic. Mixing photographs, documents, newspaper clippings, emails, quotations, and original text, the book is a searching project about memory and narrative, where the personal is confronted by the forceful hand of history. In this book, as Levine traces the course of several lives and events, from Gertrude Stein in occupied France to life in Southern California during the McCarthy era, and in the fragments that remain, the many traumas of the time find their voice in the poetic detail of a stream-of-consciousness scrapbook.

Join us for a launch Friday, May 3, 6-8PM, featuring a conversation about the publication of Volumes 2-5 with designer Prem Krishnamurthy of Project Projects, author Dan Burstein and Anne-Marie Levine, and a forward glance at the next and final volumes, which will appear as a boxed set. The publication retails for $20.00 and is available through the Printed Matter website here.

Anne-Marie Levine is a former concert pianist. The author of three books of poetry, she has published prose pieces on Gertrude Stein and on trauma and art; she’s a visual artist as well, a maker of box art, miniature paintings and digital prints.