Mistake

“Mistake is a brilliant book about reading, particularly about reading events that could be construed as accident or chance. Evolution, environmental disaster: are they error or fate or choice? Stricker ingeniously poses this question through typography and design—themselves forms fabulously open to accident—presenting us with poetic texts whose rough surfaces ‘will not be smoothed out’ in favor of easy answers. If we endure the difficulty of forgoing certain meaning in order to pursue deeper inquiry, then we find ourselves at the threshold of the illegible, the beginning of revelation. That’s exactly ‘where grief drops me / greasy-haired, openmouthed,’ she writes, ‘species skin / contaminant question flecks all over // spit word flux.’ If these pages have, like Orpheus, been torn apart by grief’s passion, then they, too, like Orpheus, come to us mortally wounded and still singing. I love this Mistake. I hope Meredith Stricker makes more of them.” Brian Teare, author of Pleasure