Margins
Galerie de Difformité book cover
Galerie de Difformité
2011
First Published
3.48
Average Rating
268
Number of Pages

Traces of many books mask themselves inside Gretchen E. Henderson’s Galerie de Difformité. With the head of a novel and the body of a poem, this extraordinary work interrogates the nuanced concepts of ability/disability, voyeurism/exhibition, deformity/normality—all with a wry sense of self-representational humor. A lineage that bequeaths mysterious relics to an unsuspecting recipient, led through a textual labyrinth by a deformed reincarnation of Dante’s muse. The story-within-a-story takes shape through the mysterious “Undertaker”—a perhaps reanimated-yet-disabled Beatrice, intertwined with the contemporary Gloria Heys and the presumed publisher, Gretchen E. Henderson. An infamous brotherhood called Ye Ugly Face Clubb. Lushly designed with crowdsourced images, text deconstructions, and enough narrative tomfoolery to make Tristram Shandy blush, the Galerie is both funhouse and curiosity cabinet, art catalogue and “choose your own adventure.” This bestiary of the novel-as-poem-as-essayas- art grows outside of the bounds of the Book and, in the process, redefines deformity for the digital millennium.

Avg Rating
3.48
Number of Ratings
23
5 STARS
30%
4 STARS
17%
3 STARS
30%
2 STARS
13%
1 STARS
9%
goodreads

Author

Gretchen E. Henderson
Author · 3 books
Gretchen E. Henderson is a lecturer in English at Georgetown University and an affiliated scholar in art history at Kenyon College. Her recent books include The House Enters the Street and Galerie de Difformité.
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