"ANTIKYTHERA” bears the name of an Ancient Greek analog computer, used to track cosmic time and record & notate historical progress. This book is thus not a start, but a continuation of ongoing perceptual mapping and inquiry towards universal and somatic life-systems. It is also the third volume of a text-in-progress (the first parts of which have yet to appear). The supposition of “ANTIKYTHERA” is that the words we make now have always been under consideration alongside their deployments. The only change has been our capacity towards their (re)production—a development within our collective imaginaries—which has otherwise done nothing to drastically alter the bent of the species’ conversation. Commencing from a form derived from visual modes of production (which the author calls a “Panel”), Thom Eichelberger-Young moves swiftly—between documentary, critique, political attack, and diary—in order to pull on nerve strands from previous interlocutors (the rattled off list includes: Outsider Art, LANGUAGE poetries, N.H. Pritchard’s shapes and sounds, Tina Darragh, Joan Retallack’s clinamen, amongst countless others) to document an ongoing always. “ANTIKYTHERA” is a transgressive reading experience often in flux. Its gears are always changing, and its rules await discovery.
Thom Eichelberger-Young (T E-Y) is an artist, publisher, editor, and mental health caregiver living in Buffalo, New York. Their work includes the books BESPOKE (Saint Andrews University Press, 2019), and TUPELO IS A GENUS OF DECIDUOUS TREE (Blue Bag Press, 2024). Thom operates Blue Bag Press and is found doing such on IG @bluebagpress or
bluebagpress.squarespace.com. This work is excerpted from a longer project tentatively titled THE PANELS.
Advanced Praise for "ANTIKYTHERA"
Allow[ing] the error to remain," indeed, and perchance to even bask in it? I delight in reporting that this book's datura-like glitch-work in and out of hylotropic and holotropic states places me squarely in the freakish, yet comforting maelstrom of Eichelberger-Young's hook echo. "Walls and walls: and walls moving so some walls are: upside down & vertical to other walls:" these panels define a space, "a system of belief." I'm reminded of Leslie Scalapino's preface to her poem-play (or, "demonstration as action") The Weatherman Turns Himself In: "designated parts are not characters, but rather 'interior' conversation ('seeing' one's own thought)...viewing text itself...as if one's mind is at once an other limb's physical motion." ANTIKYTHERA sputters with the maximal dreamwork of contemporary experience.
--Ryan Skrabalak
Early in Antikythera, the author asks “what is the nature of my work [ ... ] I have questions [ ... ] I have a quest.” In scale, these panels range from the intimacies of everyday life to geopolitical disasters (social, economic, environmental), to which they bring their questions and their questing desire for a more inclusive and responsive mode of writing. This is an important step in their journey and I look forward to seeing where it leads.
--Ted Pearson
Recalling Fredric Jameson’s notion of a “cognitive map,” Thom Eichelberger-Young’s Antikythera is an urgent and necessary mapping of our precarious and uncertain present. Titled after an ancient analogue computer used to track the movements of celestial bodies, Antikythera unfolds through a series of interlocking “panels”: vignettes and snapshots of an interiority coming into complicated but intimate contact with a myriad of places, people, genders, and traditions; or, as the poet would have it, “We live / entanglements and knots.” We travel from Japan to Buffalo, NY, to Lebanon, carried all the while in Eichelberger-Young’s cacophonous lyricism, a language that owes as much to the poetry of CAConrad and Joan Retallack as it does to internet discourse and the nation state’s jargon of policing and control. “The national order . . . died & ours is the place to recuperate it,” Eichelberger-Young informs us. What remains are these incandescent fragments to light the way to our collective future(s).
--George Fragopoulos
On each page a rectangular text with justified margins both left and right, multiple type styles, and variable spacing make for an aesthetically stimulating experience. Inside and alongside the boxes we find a treasure trove of disparate contents – personal, political, literary, and everyday. I am reminded of the lingual epiphanies of Hannah Weiner or the dreamlike pronouncements of John Wieners. This work calls into question how and why we make sense of the plethora of data that strobe our senses. Maximal visual ambiguity places the composition squarely in the mind of the reader (“The reader-writer relationship spins”) i.e., this text is about you
--Kit Robinson