1999
ISBN 1-880713-16-0
$10.00

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Populace 
by Elizabeth Treadwell

 
The stories, poems and prose poems in Populace are brief but vivid portraits of individuals, families, and groups of friends, their stories flickering back and forth in time and place, across cities and decades. Like Gertrude Stein in her famous prose portraits, Elizabeth Treadwell has carefully controlled and often contorted the traditional elements of narrative language, allowing her writing to move with the transience of everydayspeech and the strange logic of memory. These are not the quiet epiphanies of conventional fiction but the sudden, scary, funny apprehensions of daily life, rendered with fearlessness and insight.
 

Real-time actions (of one's) are as interrupted as dream-actions—therefore one sees right between them, in them in this text. One's going on seeing, while also being separately in those actions. Treadwell has these actions meet, in Populace, in a way that's incredibly acute. --Leslie Scalapino

With voices of joy, triumph, camaraderie and anarchy, Elizabeth Treadwell's utopian democracy opens up a new door into the overlooked corners of our world—a world in which women have dignity, humor, and aplomb, and where the disenfranchised have intelligence and spunk. Her use of language is nothing short of heart-stopping, and the conversations that create the polyphonies are restless, constructivist, and dream-inspiring. The stories are funny and engaging—scenes from the suburbs, barrios, psychiatric wards, dorms, small towns, cities, and grandma's houses we all know, love, and sometimes fear. Comfortable yet edgy, always utterly intelligent—Populace is truly irresistible. --Susan Smith Nash

In Elizabeth Treadwell's Populace, what she chances to remember or know about herself or someone else—romance, family misery, fashion—becomes a fragment that calls to other such fragments. They gather into portraits of women who perform their identities with amused concentration. The turns of their stories are narrative gestures not unlike the feints and cutbacks of runway models. In Treadwell's girline avant-garde, withholding judgment is one form of seduction and splurging on gorgeous language is another. --Robert Glück