Simulacrum Press #25: ‘teksker’ by Franco Cortese

Franco Cortese’s ‘teksker‘, is an 8.5″x8.5″ chapbook of 18 pages. Produced in an edition of 45.

A chapbook of intense humanity, of the naked body, Franco Cortese’s teksker (a blend of the Proto-Indo-European root *teks- (“to weave; to fabricate; to make wicker or wattle fabric for mud-covered house walls”),  *sker-(1) (“to cut”) and *sker-(2) (“to turn, bend”), presents the reader with multilingual lipograms that eschew the use of all vowels entirely; line-unit anagrams and multilingual lipogramatic palindromes to name but a few of the constraints which Cortese wields.
If the tower of Babel was a frustration in its flood of languages, Cortese revels in that same noise, conducting it into raw beauty.

FROM TEKSKER:

a

mother wretched egg skin divination water stream wither a hole in the ground from which water can be obtained the hollow where a limb joins the trunk of an animal or tree wetnurse to believe that something will happen groping form of address to any man who is elder than you the altar stone where they hunt absent soil soul bruise wing wind to point wood old wives’ tale to egg on thought any altar for sacrifices elder brother a bad smell a collection of things associated with a person or place with love to breed well to fade what period of time half continual up to rim

aba aĉa āda afa aga aha aja aka ala ama ana apa aqa ara asa ata ava awa axa aya aza aza
aya axa awa ava ata asa ara aqa apa ana ama ala aka aja aha aga afã ada acá aba

ancestors rotten leather dust to discipline river time within a winglike bone a toxic by-product of improper or incomplete digestion in a direction analogous to up but along the additional axis added by the fourth dimension to devour elder brother blood scepter shadow hole hour to align on an axis palm birthmark a section of a village I to orientate distant opening a hunting deliberately interim uncle stolen to be old ruin to give birth to root cut river to lack effort to be as of fathers