Isle of the Signatories

Author: Marjorie Welish

Publisher: Coffee House Press (2008)

Are all contingencies still in effect?
Okay Okay Okay
Of or
referring to antecedent future sentences in creases:
as, insofar as, even as, yes! Of which
antecedent future increasing salvage do we write?

In her latest collection, Marjorie Welish invents a world of public inscriptions. From graffiti to scholarly dedication and from historical placards to words etched in granite, she employs a variety of fonts to explore the dangers of rhetoric, the mysteries of coded language, the enigmas of form, the powerful gift of dedication, and the strange sense and substance of both new and dying literary conventions.

“Public inscriptions are all around us. Their mystery and the lack thereof are the off-screen subject of Marjorie Welish’s gritty, beguiling Isle of the Signatories, to be pondered long after lesser inscriptions have given up their secrets.”

–John Ashbery