Reviews of In a Combination of Practices
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A Brenda Hillman Selection


“Barbara Maloutas’ ‘practices’ have the quiet and confidence to proceed, without self-advertisement, through an experience of language often fresh and unassuming as a first glance. Personal or public seem beside the point as the reader is welcome to follow the page to its hospitable though sometimes unexpected end. A first book of uncommon maturity and accomplishment.”

—Paul Vangelisi

“Cocteau said his work wasn’t produced from dreams, but rather initiates dreams. The first piece of Barbara Maloutas’ In a Conbination of Practices, is exact unfolding of the author’s dreams, but these produce events that are only the writing, are not merely descriptions of the dreams (as past events). That I, these events have’t occurred before that writing—which has also its own unknown futures. Her lines are an investigation that’s ‘the mind of become.’ Maloutas’ book is: writing as an outside operation—as if it were the operation of plants, for example, but which undergoing ‘transfer within’ (that is, poetry) is a person’s operations.”

—Leslie Scalapino

“In a Combination of Practices is just that, a combination of various poetic practices that creates a sense of varied—at times even conflicting—wonderment. But Maloutas’ work is more than pastiche; her writing, in fact, is relational, a positing of one idea, one expression next to, against, back to back or in a geographical relationship with another. As she notes, ‘To evaluateTopography’ is important. How words look or are located in relation to each other, indeed, defines how people comprehend their world, how they perceive themselves and one another. Hers is a turning, folding, heaping world, where meaning shifts like geological forces.”

—Douglas Messerli

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