HIGHAM-STAINTON, Rose
Limn the Distance

After hours in the dry heat of the polytunnel with its blue tarp and the warm and hopeless rotational pull of its fan system, we enter delirium—at the edges of our bodies—skin slick and supple with allium dust and sweat.

To know one’s place, to lose one’s place—

Years have unfurled—entire pandemics—since I began; began to depart from the original conception of my place, my writing, my body and began to know the edges of them—as limits, as possibilities—the lip, brink, shores of them; their fringes.

Limn the Distance imagines decentralisation through the poetics of Bernadette Mayer and the concentric communities of one mountain. From major cities to art worlds, godheads to bodies and the spaces they inhabit, it asks what happens when we move away from the assumed nuclei of these knowledge and value systems. Orbiting around one mountain in upstate New York, Limn the Distance speaks of and through the communities that have resided there—from the radical sectarian shakers, and efforts towards communitarian living and small-scale farming that have happened in their wake, as well as the life and legacy of Bernadette Mayer who lived nearby. Through personal narrative and lyrical essay, the book draws on communitarian and artistic traditions of decentralised practice and resists the easy binarisms of solitude and sociality, ruralism and urbanism.

[publisher's note]

Published by JOAN, 2023
Essays