Redell Olsen, Secure Portable Space (Reality Street, 2004).
“Secure Portable Space intelligently, playfully, and mercilessly refigures gender covers and gender codes. Olsen is a performative poet whose language acts with great precision on the page.” Carla Harryman
“This book is an ambitious exploration and study of form: stretching poetry’s power and capacity to play with and expose the shapes words make on their way to making meaning.” Kristin Prevallet
“Secure Portable Space is full of recombinant surprise, filmic ambiguity and more: grippingly melancholic and witty explorations of the lite/noir courage and absurdity of culture, politics and gender. It is broadly knowledgeable, humorous, grave. A note says ‘blink left: gazes out of shot’. Precisely. This angle of attention ‘renders ajar’ a full, empathic visibility available only in an ingenious poetics. The final section is a brilliant rewriting of Olson’s Maximus Poems into Olsen’s Minimaus Poems. You’d be crazy to miss it!” Joan Retallack.
See also video footage from eraofheroes (performance in 2003, published in Secure Portable Space).
PDF for download of Minimaus Poems – Extract theminimauspoemsRedellOlsen