John Latta posts a review of our beloved work.

Above: Sample spread from opolis (y for relevance was the idea), a booklet of photographs and a poem. Brandt/Workman. Doha, Qatar.

John Latta, host of Isola di Rifiuti, has recently reviewed our work. Follow the link here to his site and scroll down to the February 12 entry. We were so grateful to discover John’s generous words on our beloved opolis.

John writes: “There’s something otherworldly about Elisabeth Workman’s Dusie Kollektiv chapbook Opolis (tÿpøgrafika, 2007). The thinnish canary-yellow paper, imprint’d in green inks, covers of identical stock—it’s audaciously flimsy, an honest pamphlet, recalls the era of fluttery blue aerogrammes with words writ small, inks in danger of bleeding through, a Spartan age of frugality and freedom, under the eave chambres de bonne with a yoghurt and a litre of beer wedged next to the ornamental ironwork. Air transport shot cloud cover for cover, with Opolis reversed out, unserif’d, inconspicuous, recto and verso. And shot through (accompanying each of the twenty-six prose-looking texts) with photographs, architectural, signage, Arabic, a Michelangelo David against a brick wall, minaret silhouettes, a Bush-vampire fanging Lady Liberty, pines, debris, print’d every which way, and bleeding spectacular ghost images “behind” each piece. The graphic work and images by Erik Brandt. Print’d in Doha, Qatar. Epigraph by Charles Baudelaire, that sheik of modernity: “N’importe où! n’importe où! pourvu que ce soit hors de ce monde!” “Somewhere! anywhere! just so long as it’s not this world!”

Another excerpt: “Opolis seems wholly and profoundly of its era (an “era” partially defined by statements like Workman’s “heaven is as hell is a hoax I decide so I make up multiple eras all at once and so overwhelming one wants to explode out of sheer inherited longing”). The unnamed global city consciousness-miasma we imperialists’ve inherited versus the longing for elsewhere.”

We are so grateful. Aside from his profound work on Isola di Rifiuti, John is the author of Breeze (University of Notre Dame Press, 2003) and Rubbing Torsos
(Ithaca House, 1979).

Thank you, John. Thanks too for discovering this photograph.

Olaf and Inge wed. Summer, 2005. Bellefonte, PA.