The Persons

Peter Jaeger

Price £7.50+pp
ISBN 978-1-907468-04-9
Year 2011
Edition 300
Pages 54pp
Binding Perfect bound; full colour cover; text only inside

In 2010 the Canadian poet Peter Jaeger celebrated his fiftieth birthday. The Persons is a scrapbook of found texts that have been clipped, archived, and sorted for their parallel grammatical structure, with the proper name and verb always preceding their complimentary parts. Those fragments are then rearranged so that no two consecutive sentences come from the same source. Jaeger’s life, here, is thus written through the words of others: those protagonists who animated his imagination and left their traces in the newspapers, emails, diaries, books (from literature to philosophy), and all the countless ephemera with which the externalized inner drama of our lives plays out.

The Persons presents readers with an alternative form of life writing, taking as it does the autobiographical details of people whom Jaeger encountered in print during the first 50 years of his lifetime:

Rob leaves. Annie wins the women’s overall title. Nadeem is afraid of the Taliban’s return. José asserts that Robert staged his famous photo. Perry arrives carrying a feather. Ariel wears brown wool. Kash believes the police will follow his orders on tasers. Mitch died of AIDS. Kyozan hears the edgeless sound of the deep night. Rick gave up looking for a job, calling the search a “why bother” scenario. Larry turns to the wall and puts his head against it . . .”

Book launch for The Persons at The London Art Book Fair, Whitechapel Gallery, 23-25 September 2011