“In Quartet every paragraph seems an effort at ceremony, the words of dead friends are treated as haunted statuary, and random narrations of daily living are weighted with emblems of the occult. Sometimes the luster is found in the editing, or the fact that La Rocco casts an impossibly wide gaze. Her words can feel more like video footage, sharp, available and bordering on surveillance.” -Cedar Sigo

An elegy to four critical and poetic minds — Bill Berkson, Douglas Crimp, Kevin Killian, Sam Miller — Quartet (Ugly Duckling Presse) is also a meditation on ancestors, on how those who are no longer here affect our way of being, of writing, of moving through the world. Poet, novelist, writer of and on performance Claudia La Rocco weaves fragile threads of acquaintanceship and intimacy into a chamber piece of voices, attitudes, and gestures of attention, spurred on by the restless interplay of present, past, and page. Quartet’s motifs run unpredictably along our sociality’s frayed edges, seeking connections in the questions we’re left with after the passing of lives and eras, inescapably edged by legacies of privileged belonging.

This pamphlet is part of UDP’s 2020 Pamphlet Series: twenty commissioned essays on collective work, translation, performance, pedagogy, poetics, and small press publishing.