Long Pass

Long Pass is narrated by people who set out to communicate something simple and heartfelt, and who get caught up mid-expression in the social and linguistic complexities of communication: how can we say what we mean when language is made up with sets and sets of social values, cultural biases, linguistic tics, etymological convolutions and inconsistencies? Come to that, how can we explain what we feel to ourselves, when we do so in a common, intersubjective language? It's a poetry which believes the most arcane quibbling of analytic philosophy and the purplest of sentimentality can't be held apart; that stonily rational language often conceals or represses – and therefore implies – chaotic emotional depths, and vice versa. Long Pass is fascinated by the ways that translation, formal structures, jokes and word games can be a way of disrupting our ability to present ourselves as we unconsciously desire to do, and so become a way of being more honest or self-revelatory than honesty or confession. Even before we know what we have to confess, in fact, Long Pass wants to ask what the relationship is between experience or perception and the language we use to understand, describe and structure than experience. It's a book about language, but only because language is all we have to make what we feel like is inside of us available to other people. Full of a belief that our most intimate personal and even internal lives are deeply political and social, Long Pass is about the hopeless optimism of hoping to get something across, clean and intact, from one person to another.