Authors: Candace Hill Montgomery, David Grundy Publisher: Further Other Book Works (2026) Abstractive is a collaboration in words and images. It was begun in person at Candace Hill Montgomery’s house in Bridgehampton while David Grundy was on an artist’s residency at The Church, Sag Harbor in Summer 2024, and continued virtually into Winter 2024, with final additions and revisions in late 2025 and early 2026. The title comes from poet-composer Russell Atkins, who passed away in summer 2024 at the age of 98, and whose work in concrete and ‘abstractive’ poetry as far back as the 1940s forms part of a lineage of Black experimentation and abstraction that has long been ignored or glossed over. The word ‘abstractive’ emphasizes abstraction not as fixed destination but as dynamic process: a collaborative dialogue, between writers, between language and image, between representation and what lies beyond or beneath or around it. Candace Hill Montgomery began working on these ideas in the epic detective poem with images entitled Short Leash Kept On, which engages with the poets Atkins, Lloyd Addison, and Leroy McLucas, and with artist Tom Feelings, and was published by David’s Materials press in 2022.
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