As We Know - Amaranth Borsuk & Andy Fitch

Praise for As We Know

Roland Barthes introduces us to this remarkable book: a “corrected banality.” I can imagine no better spokesperson than the one who announced the death of the author, for As We Know is truly a work of “destroyed origin,” in which “all identity is lost.” Borsuk takes hold of Fitch’s notebooks, filled with their gorgeous banalities, and forges them into a graphic sprawl that belongs to no one of no gender. And yet, we read these confessional fragments with as much eagerness as we bring to the secrets of our best friend, or the stars, or our selves. This “I” who speaks, who can never be known, lets language spin its own brilliant tales. “I” or “we” are enraptured.

~ JULIE CARR

Part day book, part accounting ledger compounded of morning into evening, part calendar of days removed from the A train and S-bahn, Andy Fitch and Amaranth Borsuk have unwritten most of their days, and thus outlined their lives, sometimes by crossing out, sometimes by adding a little cinnamon and cardamom to tomorrow, sometimes by simply not saying, “it’s definitely going to rain.”

~ TAN LIN

Amaranth Borsuk and Andy Fitch’s collaborative work, As We Know, is the daybook of a singularly personable fiction—a graduate student preoccupied by an unraveling dissertation, a Chaplinesque flaneur, a connoisseur of people and cats and “[s]emi-wild daisies looking breeze blown / as they wilt / and some / Floating / construction along water’s edge.” Re-imagining memoir as a palimpsest of erasures, As We Know invents a new kind of Personism that, remarkably, feels more human, more intimate, and more buoyantly alive precisely because of its artful subtractions.

~ SRIKANTH REDDY

Amaranth Borsuk’s and Andy Fitch’s As We Know is beautifully set adrift within the lines of a diary from April to June, cross-wired (10 AM-as-hingepoint) in three locations: New York, Home, and Berlin. Deftly keen, the language here moves within the realm of sensorium and sensation, open lines and strikeouts: a “platform smells like caramel. / This split / in my crotch is now comforting…” This brilliant collaboration in which “The one who writes / doesn’t know any more than the other,” proceeds with subtle cultural critique: “The whole idea of being a hipster is just / showing yourself through signs.” Meditating in a world of Whole Foods, Mom, black flats, books, old tennis rackets, and discarded computers, the “one who writes” is compellingly reflective “(as an American, I could beat up at least 10 European Kids / I’ve never gotten / in a fight)” throughout this arrestingly honest and poignant book.

~ RONALDO WILSON