Dictee

Reviews / Votes

"Reads like a secret dossier, stuffed with epistles and pictures, religion, and dreams." * Village Voice * "Cha made quiet work with a disquieting impact." * New York Times * "Too often, of course, the colonizing function of language goes about its invisible work without comment, but in Dictee each scene, each image, each poem or letter purposefully refers us back to it." * Paris Review * "A fringe classic for students of women's studies, book arts, and poetry." * Artforum * "A resolutely avant-garde book. . . . Dictee has spent decades as a cult classic, becoming a fixture of Asian American and feminist studies syllabi across the country." * The Nation * "All writers who play with form that have come since are indebted to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, often without even knowing it." * Kenyon Review * "It remains as radical a text as it was when I first found it, daring to hold a space open somewhere in between several genres, and to let tensions remain unresolved, or ambiguous, to pursue if not the articulation of the inarticulate, then, to let the reader experience what is inarticulate within themselves still in a space that makes room for it or even values it." -- Alexander Chee, * Electric Lit * "Dictee was one of the first books that taught me the transformative power that art could have on the material of a life-that conceptual art wasn't only populated by urban white folks, and lives like Cha's or mine or my mother's could make a strange and wild home there, too." -- Elaine Castillo, * Electric Lit * "Dictee addresses themes of time, language, and memory that recur in much of the artist's work while incorporating multiple forms of media, language, and historical material. . . . Nine chapters, structured around the muses of Greek mythology, result in a form that is novel, prose poem, biography, and photo book all at once." * Hyperallergic * "Cha's work is both academic and emotionally present, theoretical and practical. It eschews easy classification, and is influenced by filmmakers as much as it is by playwrights, visual artists, poets, and critics." * Ploughshares * "Dictee enlarges the notion of what a book is. . . . Because it is ephemeral, fragile, fierce, and indelible, because it is subversive, because it years and is luminous." * Spin * "The brilliance of Dictee is in its subverting the dynamics of understandability: incomprehensibility as the communicative channel, obscurity as the language to discuss illumination." * Columbia Journal *