Anne Blonstein's notariqon is distinctive in two ways: it is most unusual to find the encrypted wordsin a different language from the language of those 'on screen'. This needs a special term, and we mightsettle for 'hetero-notariqon'. The practice raises our uncertainty yet another notch, for we can now supposethat we could look for words in any language we happen to know, or in which we might recognize words,whether or not we understand them.
The second distinctive feature of the notariqon in this volume is that the disclosed verb isthe title of a painting. Poems about paintings (or other visual representations) are generallytreated under the topic of ekphrasis. Ekphrasis is a rhetorical practice of putting into wordswhat is depicted, and of rendering a plastic, spatial work of art in a temporal sequence. To concealthe fact that these poems are ekphrastic, and to hide the title of the image, is to hide the pictorial,to encrypt the ekphrastic: to en- the ek-; and to render the verbal, linguistic title invisible byarranging it to be received not temporally - as words usually are - but spatially, as if it were an image.
[...]
I have attempted to describe Anne Blonstein's craft as contrascription: a way of writingthat does not aim for clarity, consistency or conclusion. Contra-scription instructs its readersin the complexities of writing, alerts us to the presence of unexpected messages and unbiddenguests: to signals at odds with each other, criss-crossing, zigzagging, resisting the semanticseductions of the straight line. Linear reading is the fundamental deception by which ourlogo-centric culture maintains its voice and its authority. In every line lies a lie. Contra-scriptionteaches us to look askance and aslant, aft and fore, to treat the page as a screen on which nothing is,as it appears to be, fixed: eye and ear must continue to work on screen. For no matter how worked, nor workedhowever hard, what has been worked on screen will never submit to the writer's authority. There will be plentyof messages found here, apart from those deliberately encrypted. For it may be texts above all - and below all -that are still visited by angels.

Anne Blonstein is above all a poet who inhabits and is inhabited by morethan one language (one poem has three stanzas, one in English, one inFrench, one in German, each a reformulation of the others; it is interestingto see that French is the language most resistant to any syntacticdeconstruction!). Like anyone who functions on a daily basis in more thanone language, using more than one language in one's poems is never a wilfulexclusion of a unilingual readership but rather the necessary and oftendesperate search of a person who feels encaged in any single linguisticsystem, which lops essential dimensions off his or her own being and in sodoing reduces their capacity for expression. No doubt this multilingualbackground has also enabled Bronstein to embark more readily on thetremendous linguistic adventure with the English language which awaits thereader of WORKED ON SCREEN.

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The language is heavily-wrought, the poems often terse and elliptical (much as the works by Klee would havebeen, I suspect) but sometimes producing scattergun effects that sound more like rage: Vaginal emptiedness /receptorfreed labyrinths / eventually nowhered / echogenously reflexing // Gasplilies / acheroses / rawberries /teartrees / ergoniums / nevergreens. It's tempting to see echoes of German grammar in those compounds. All in all,a very interesting volume ...

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Blonstein's poetry creates a network of correspondences with writers and artists across genres, language, time and space while accepting constraint. To interactwith Blonstein's notarikon makes one more reflexive about the materiality of words and more susceptible to their shades - from pleasure to pain.

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