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Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas
   
 
SECOND EDITION of Everything Sings, now available!!

An expanded and revised second edition of Denis' Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas hasjust been published by siglio. It has ten new maps, two original essays, by Albert Mobilio and Ander Monson, and an interview with Denis by Blake Butler. Wrapped in a violet dust jacket, the book is bound in abrilliant yellow with grass green endpapers. It contains every bit of the first edition. Distributed by Artbook/D.A.P., it's for sale at siglio, Amazon, and elsewhere. Among the new maps are Dogs, Barking Dogs, Flowering Trees, Roof Lines, Stories, Families, Numbers, Footprints, and Nesting. The story of Boylan Heights grows more and more interesting!
   
Denis Wood has created an atlas unlike any other. Surveying Boylan Heights, his small neighborhood in North Carolina, he subverts the traditional notions of mapmaking to discover new ways of seeing both this place in particular and the nature of place itself. Each map attunes the eye to the invisible, the overlooked, and the seemingly insignificant. From radio waves permeating the air to the location of Halloween pumpkins on porches, Wood searches for the revelatory details in what has never been mapped or may not even be mappable. In his pursuit of a “poetics of cartography,” the experience of place is primary, useless knowledge is exalted, and representation strives toward resonance. Our perception of maps and how to read them changes as we regard their beauty, marvel at their poetry, and begin to see the neighborhoods we live in anew. Everything Sings weaves a multi-layered story about one neighborhood as well as about the endeavor of truly knowing the places which we call home.
     
Praise
Links

These maps remind me of all the radio stories I love most. After all, most radio is a boring salaryman, waking up before you and me to announce the headlines or play the hits to some predetermined demographic. Yet some radio stories elbow their way into the world in defiance of that unrelentingly practical mission, with the same goal Denis Wood’s maps have: to take a form that’s not intended for feeling or mystery and make it breathe with human life. Click to read more of the Ira Glass introduction on the Siglio website.

-IRA GLASS (from his introduction)

Definitely worth buying, to pick up and consider again and again, this book is a poetic naming of a neighborhood that will almost certainly make you reconsider your own sense of place.

-Amara Holstein from the Portland Monthly

...an epic love poem to an idealized vision of what cartography can be, beautifully realized....The enjoyment of Everything Sings is not just about the maps, however. Wood’s opening chapter...is a brief but invigorating stroll through 20th century intellectualism. The texts paired with each map are a well-balanced mish-mash of history, commentary, poetry, and craft. Though the book lends itself to a casual flip-through, taking in the maps simply as individual pieces of art, Everything Sings is meant to be read.

-Rob Tennant from Fanzine

Astonishing. So much so that this review almost died aborning. Doing genuine justice to this slim but subversive and innovative volume would require a critique the length of a full Annals article and would also call for analytical and communicative skills that might be beyond my grasp.

-Wilbur Zelinsky from the Annals.

Harvard Book Store's Crag recommends Everything Sings in a video review.


LOS ANGELES BOOK LAUNCH FOR THE SECOND EDITION OF EVERYTHING SINGS: THIS PAST APRIL AT THE LAST BOOKSTORE: DENIS WOOD IN CONVERSATION WITH THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK CRITIC DAVID ULIN. This evening of wide-ranging conversation between two writers with equally critical and imaginative faculties dug into Denis' process and influences as well the myriad connections his mapmaking draws between seemingly disparate things. The Last Bookstore, 453 S. Spring Street (near 5th Street), downtown Los Angeles. Ph: 213-488-0599.

See Excerpts Here.

 

NEW Denis discusses Everything Sings on This American Life. NEW

NEW Wilbur Zelinsky reviews Everything Sings for the Annals. NEW

NEW A review of Everything Sings has
just been published in the Brazilian journal for humanistic geography, Geograficidade. NEW

NEW Poetry in Place - Review of Everything Sings in the Portland Monthly. NEW

Click here for review of Everything Sings in Fanzine.

Read the review of Everything Sings in Cartographica.

See one of the maps from Everything Sings on the cover of the Nov/Dec issue of Poets and Writers

Read about Everything Sings on Ira Glass's This American Life blog.

Places/The Design Observer has posted a feature about Denis' neighborhood maps on their blog that includes four new maps made especially for Places.

Visualisation Magazine Vol. 4 (The handmade volume) has just published an Everything Sings feature. On the last two pages the editor displays original sketches from "The Night Sky" map arranged to form a horizon. All the original sketches that turned into "The Night Sky" map horizon are posted at siglioblog.

Vincent Del Casino (California State University, Long Beach), has writtena review of Everything Sings and Making Maps in verse. In press in the Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers, 2011.

See some of the unpublished working drawings from Everything Sings at the Siglo blog. Siglio will be adding to these in coming months. Click here and here.


In April, Denis spoke at the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, Washington about his new book, Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas (download audio file).

Click here for more from Siglio.
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