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Ann Cotten

Ann Cotten, Vienna, 10 May 2023

“I write for the text.”

With 2023’s “Ancestral Destructions,” author Ann Cotton released an intricately light-footed, compact travelogue about Hawaii, colonization, and both learning and dancing foreign languages. Beneath a tangle of highway onramps on the outskirts of Vienna, Cotten expounds upon the wobbly relationship between form and substance (as demonstrated in her “Sonnets from the Dictionary of Borrowed Words”), visual languages and verbal images, walking, reading and writing, and other escape movements: “I am, after all, someone who’s forever on the run.”