Belladonna* Collaborative’s Germinal Texts are works that trace feminist avant-garde histories and the poetic lin-eages they produce. The series focuses on authors and texts that serve as generative grounds for other writers. Germinal Texts gesture, then, to networks of affiliation; to alliances, inheritances, sites of community; to the unfolding of a work through its readers; and to always pro-visional origins without ends. Germinal Texts are works that gather dense histories and, for this reason, the series is designed to open discussion, through contextualizing front and back matter that launches new conversations.
The first text in the Germinal Texts series, Theory, A Sunday (2013), is a translation of La théorie, un dimanche, first published by remue ménage in 1988. Theory, A Sunday is a mixed genre, multiply authored work of feminist auto-criticism, poetry, and fiction by Louky Bersianik, Nicole Brossard, Louise Cotnoir, Louise Dupré, Gail Scott, and France Théoret. Belladonna’s translated republication brings the work of these Quebecois writers to new audiences (generationally, linguistically, and geo-graphically), with an introduction by Lisa Robertson and an afterword by Rachel Levitsky and Gail Scott.
The second work in the series is Lyn Hejinian’s Positions of the Sun, a book of twenty-six interlocking “essays with characters” that explores the mid-2000s financial “crisis” through the movements and daily lives of a wide-ranging cast of characters located in the Bay Area. In Positions, Hejinian plays the bricoleur, bringing together whatever’s needed in her to approach to the subject—whether the paratactic tactics of poetry, schol-arship’s critical patchwork, dramatic action (but not plot), or characters set in time that evokes but frustrates narrative. Earlier iterations of essays 4, 14, and 17 appeared in Belladonna’s Elders Series #5, edited by Jennifer Scappettone.
Samuel Ace’s / Linda Smukler’s Meet Me There is the third volume in the series. Meet Me There is a paired repub-lication of Normal Sex (Firebrand Books, 1994) and Home in three days. Don’t wash. (Hard Press, 1996). In the present edition, the texts are accompanied by a new introduction and poem by Samuel Ace, and by a collection of short essays and reflections on Ace and Smukler’s poetics. Meet Me There brings together Ace / Smukler’s remarkable explorations of the interplay of language, desire, sex, and identity, and repositions this work, 25 years later, in the midst of burgeoning contemporary conversations about gen-der, sexuality, sociality, language, politics, and poetics.
