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Sep 10, 2024

Fonograf Editions ISBN: 978-1-964499-42-0 $17.95 • 136 pp • 5.5 x 8.5 September 16, 2025 Distributed by New York University Press Cover and text design: Mike Corrao

Sep 10, 2024

A collection of linked essays and poems concerned with the vitality of art and writing in the wake of grief.

At the intersections of poetry, sonic/ visual text, nonfiction, and arts writing, Traceable Relation portrays a writer’s practice within a lineage of aesthetic and practical sensibilities conveyed in the personal effects of her late father and the concrete tasks of communal mourning. In an ongoing practice of “speaking nearby” various works of film, sound installation and pop music, innovative, contemporary writing emerges from diasporic arts of memory and survivance.

Praise

Any traceable relation points to untraceable voices, references and lineages too faint or tenuous to glimpse. Here, it prompts an ardent inquiry into the uses and limits of language, a foundational critique of colonial damage, and a tender appraisal of form. It's no surprise that Chantal Akerman is among the many who inform this book which, like that director’s films, inhabits life in its spatial, sonic, and affective dimensions so we might experience realities in increments, word by word and shadow by shadow. Wielding citation as a loving practice, Kimberly Alidio invites us to reflect with care and rigor on fading and emerging legacies, even—and especially—when losses leave us reeling. Traceable Relation seeks a synthesis of what we inherit and what we claim.

—Matt Longabucco, author of M/W: An essay on Jean Eustache's La maman et la putain

An exquisitely sculpted living-thinking-breathing work. Whenever I put it down I immediately want to pick it back up. Traceable Relation is everything I want to read.

—Renee Gladman, author of My Lesbian Novel

To read Traceable Relation is to enter the space of Kimberly Alidio's writing, where I am drawn through different voicings of grief, longing, and music (or narrative's) "blurred edges around a fact." Like a score interested in the history of sound—like Raven Chacon's—or one that courses through history making several variations on a theme—like Julius Eastman's—Alidio's book explores (and enacts) the past's framing of the present, lineage as a orchestral movement rather than notational device, dictum. I am both moved and changed by the ghosts this book contains, and the way a sentence can become a song, a screen, a record, another trace of utterance and love.

—Alexis Almeida, author of Things I Have Made a Fiction, translator of Roberta Iannamico's Many Poems