GINS, Madeline (1941-2014)

Grossman Publishers

1969

First Printing

Review Copy

8 1/4″ x 6 1/4″

Drawings by Arakawa

VG/ VG

Madeline Ginss Word Rain (1969), which by now is commonly regarded as the most extreme example of self-reflexive fiction.

Word Rain, like later texts by Madeline Gins, is an atmospheric object, one which seeks to include every mobile peripheral zone and perpetrates repeated assaults on solid boundaries. Word Rain, in keeping with its saturated, pouring title, blurs subject and object, theme and subject: dampens subjectivity into an it (it says, says its strange, drawn-out title), following what one might call a rule of thumb

Is the tensile subject the subject of the book ? The subject of reading ? Of writing ? How tensile ? Tensile as in extensible ? Or as tensed ? Syntactically, I find her room goes back and forth, at top speed, between two reading options, depending on whether her is a possessive adjective, or she to whom room is destined. A lot here depends on whether. A lot here depends on (the) weather