Tyann Prentice - In this reimagining of Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love the internal territories and machinations of the failing body are distorted into various acts the ‘narrator’ uses to enter into further visionary states—dendritic realities, the divergent selves that inhabit them, and the desire that communicates between

Tyann Prentice, To See Your Love Suffer, We Heard You Like Books, 2017.


To See Your Love Suffer is a reimagining of Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love, a recounting of the explicit visions of Christ crucified as Norwich lay dying of an undisclosed illness. But she survived. In this reimagining, the internal territories and machinations of the failing body are distorted into various acts the ‘narrator’ uses to enter into further visionary states—dendritic realities, the divergent selves that inhabit them, and the desire that communicates between… or creates them in relation to each other. 


Prentice on PLINTH Read
Prentice in LIES/ISLE Read


To See Your Love Suffer (We Heard You Like Books, 2017) reimagines the Revelations of Divine Love experienced by Julian of Norwich / in which the narrator lies bedridden / approaching death as she witnesses a series of mystic visions / visceral and erotic images connected to the crucified Christ / trapped in bed / the setting becomes distant and abstract / on the surface a sick-bed novel / reminiscent of Malone Dies and By Night In Chile / but neither approach the same kind of hallucinatory mise-en-scene / without mobility Prentice turns the body into its own landscape / each event set within Julian of Norwich / "A body as text but I don't write my body—you do, fashioning / me as a book to be read." / the text localized / rendered tactile and haptic / each page fells like a plane of existence / topologies shaped by paper and press / or like the inside of the victim's skull / ink as it forms the language of a divined figure / images tapped from an unknowable source //
The first half of this book almost exclusively plays out within the narrator's psyche / where the reader is left to wander / through mystic ambiguities / encountering occult symbols / evidence of the holy and desirable / Prentice shapes a new book-body / laid out in a style swaying between prose and poetics / scrawling words inside the self / where we are brought to find them / questioning the circumstances of their formation / trying to reconstruct their previous and new meanings /  the visions experienced by Julian of Norwich feel true and powerful / more capable in their approach towards the drifting ontology / of the bedridden protagonist / more natural than the ramblings of By Night In Chile / or the rhythmic hysteria of Malone Dies / each new image drags itself from the unconscious / a voice does not carry itself through the void / divine manifestations descend through a biological medium //
You pry open the skull of the author and ask yourself where this might be leading you / what you're supposed to do with what you've found / the answer is not in front of you / To See Your Love Suffer feels large in its specificity / in its exploration of these visions / the text is someone else's body / its intricacies are unknown to the reader / every neural process appears nuanced / yet indecipherable / at this distance Prentice has created something written through the reader's interpretation / each new understanding / the book-body changes / observations mutate the shape of a perceived narrative / the text creates shapes itself through the reader // - Mike Corrao
http://thediagram.com/19_1/rev_prentice.html




Tyann Prentice is a mid-life crisis giving up and throwing herself back into punk, though her rage is much more willful these days―days spent caring for addicts and the mentally ill, and screaming litanies into her post-industrial noise project Ox Hunger. She studies medieval heretical sects, designs things for paper and only sometimes writes in Seattle, WA.