ui [Paperback]

u&i is a meditation on the imaginarywhat exists and what doesnt, how does something exist when it knows it is imaginary, how is it to be reckoned with. u&i asks what exists when a book is written. u&i is telling a story to the things that are actual loss. Things that are gone become further proof of existence and not. u&i asks what are the can and cant of existence, as well as the cant of existencethe domestic and repeating cant, as things circle themselves until they think they exist a little more. There is, in u&i, cant as incantation.

CASSANDRA SMITH is a poet and visual artist. She has exhibited her book and photography installations in Oakland, San Francisco, Sacramento, Portland, Chicago, and Memphis. You can visit her website at www.moloprojects.org.

"Cassandra Smith creates a work that is of rare singular focus reminiscent of Roland Barthe’sA Lover’s Discourse. I remember my first reading of his book as a college student, finding myself both witnessing and being inside of love and of the book. I was in love with not a person but rather an idea, a concept, an inquiry of love itself. How did I find myself here again at 45 years of age? I am elated, grateful and perhaps even stricken for having read, for having received the gift ofU&I. Beautifully written and contemplative, I cannot help but feel a sense of devastation upon arriving as a reader."

"Cassandra Smith writes with the elegance, joie de vivre and brutality of a unicorn."

"u&iadeptly traverses the ethereal and radiant boundaries between 'to leave the meadow very alone' and to wander as a unit, to twin, to see in tandem. Is it possible to sustain a dual-vision when the 'simple logic of one or two' is never simple? What happens when one is divided from oneself, from one’s other? When the notion of beloved becomes impossible or impossibly near? In this delicate series oflc°