What drives the collector? Is the archive a site of order, the convergence of past narratives and present desires, the chaotic reflection of passions spilling over categories? Is every lover an archive waiting to come undone? Every archive a place where the dust of bodies accumulates? One file in a fond of misplaced manuscripts, Fond is haunted by an author's compulsion to repeat and the archive's inevitable limits. A finding aid guides the reader through a field of drafts, grids and marginalia, but can it account for this conflicting narrative of desire and its inevitable unraveling? A book-length disentanglement of one archive of emotion, Fond dwells in the eerily familiar, exposing the fragility of our most rigid constraints.

Kate Eichhorn is the author of Fond (2008), a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award. She is also co-editor of Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women’s Poetry and Poetics (2009) and Belladonna Elders Series, Vol. 6 (2009). Her poetry, prose and criticism are part of a serial investigation of historiography, ethnography and poetics. She teaches writing and cultural theory at The New School in New York City.

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“Fond is concerned with archive as process, as matter that makes out of words and texts (and textiles and textures) not, perhaps, meanings, but propositions about how meaning works.” —Canadian Literature