About the Author Is Dead

by Pascalle Burton, Bella Li

About the Author is Dead is another kind of 'I' a 'space of many dimensions' opened out by its varied contents. The title – a portmanteau of the two part titles within — shows how a seemingly singular entity can deceive, can undergo fission and reveal itself as multiple. Yet, awareness of the fluency with which Burton moves between screen and page, stage and keyboard, gives a sense of how she approaches the act of authorship: as experiment, as play and, most importantly, as the cultivation of an open field into which multiple texts may float and fuse to become new substances.
'Paul Bowles said 'whatever one writes is in a sense autobiographical, of course. Not factually so, but poetically so.' The poems here connect with nerves in bodies, pixels on screens, letters in words and the air's water content. There are unwitting dialogues with texts gone before; texts that have floated into the spaces I travel – online, on a bookshelf, in a dream, a film, another country, on the television.I process them < > they process me.They mingle with the ways I experience social and political currents (somewhere between solid and liquid: despair and hope). I try things, and sometimes something happens.Now, these poems float in this book for you to process < > for them to process you.' — Pascalle Burton