Quinn Latimer: Rumored Animals
Reading and Aperitif
Quinn Latimer’s first collection casts a wide lyrical net. Limning and mining a series of evocative, disparate landscapes — the Southern California coast, the high desert of Far West Texas, New York’s brick canyons, and finally the Mittel-European reaches of Germany and Switzerland — Latimer tasks these places with the procedures of the critical mind and the movements of the sensual body. Her contemporary lyric poems move from starkly personal elegies to essayistic examinations of the lives and works of writers and artists including Ingeborg Bachmann, Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, Robert Walser, Francesca Woodman, and Virginia Woolf. Through both bodies of poems runs the central image of the animal — its idea, its fact — and a fervent, feverish anthropomorphism that at once haunts and illuminates the writing at hand.
Quinn Latimer is an American poet and critic based in Basel, Switzerland. Her poems have been featured in Boston Review, The Last Magazine, The Paris Review, and elsewhere, and were recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Latimer is a regular contributor to Artforum and Frieze, and her critical writing has also appeared widely in Art in America, Bookforum, Kaleidoscope, and Modern Painters. Other activities include the Zurich Arts Supper Club, which she hosts and curates with Fabian Marti, and a series of poems-as-press-releases for SALTS, in Birsfelden, Switzerland. Educated at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University’s School of the Arts in New York, Latimer will join the faculty of the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam in Fall 2012.
