A collection of linked essays and poems concerned with the vitality of art and writing in the wake of grief.
At the intersections of poetry, sonic/ visual text, nonfiction, and arts writing, Traceable Relation portrays a writer’s practice within a lineage of aesthetic and practical sensibilities conveyed in the personal effects of her late father and the concrete tasks of communal mourning. In an ongoing practice of “speaking nearby” various works of film, sound installation and pop music, innovative, contemporary writing emerges from diasporic arts of memory and survivance.
Praise
Any traceable relation points to untraceable voices, references and lineages too faint or tenuous to glimpse. Here, it prompts an ardent inquiry into the uses and limits of language, a foundational critique of colonial damage, and a tender appraisal of form. It's no surprise that Chantal Akerman is among the many who inform this book which, like that director’s films, inhabits life in its spatial, sonic, and affective dimensions so we might experience realities in increments, word by word and shadow by shadow. Wielding citation as a loving practice, Kimberly Alidio invites us to reflect with care and rigor on fading and emerging legacies, even—and especially—when losses leave us reeling. Traceable Relation seeks a synthesis of what we inherit and what we claim.
—Matt Longabucco, author of M/W: An essay on Jean Eustache's La maman et la putain
An exquisitely sculpted living-thinking-breathing work. Whenever I put it down I immediately want to pick it back up. Traceable Relation is everything I want to read.
—Renee Gladman, author of My Lesbian Novel
To read Traceable Relation is to enter the space of Kimberly Alidio's writing, where I am drawn through different voicings of grief, longing, and music (or narrative's) "blurred edges around a fact." Like a score interested in the history of sound—like Raven Chacon's—or one that courses through history making several variations on a theme—like Julius Eastman's—Alidio's book explores (and enacts) the past's framing of the present, lineage as a orchestral movement rather than notational device, dictum. I am both moved and changed by the ghosts this book contains, and the way a sentence can become a song, a screen, a record, another trace of utterance and love.
—Alexis Almeida, author of Things I Have Made a Fiction, translator of Roberta Iannamico's Many Poems
In Kimberly Alidio’s creative economy, each word is indebted to the following one, forming a system of relation where perception is forged through repetition and recursion, rather than singularly authored lines. Everyone and everything is involved here: makers of all sorts—musicians, filmmakers, artists, family members, friends, partners—all gathered in a shared inquiry some may call critique if critique were to forgo hierarchies of judgment, applying pressure instead on matter as it meets meaning. And that’s what Kimberly does. Her prose swerving from filmic analysis, to diasporic grief, to phone operator rehearsing scripted services. Language collides with itself, breaking existing bonds to form new ones. A steady sprawl tearing at the “top layer of everything.” I’m grateful to Traceable Relation for gifting us a kind of grief that stands against nostalgia, setting letters in motion, like my son, who is just beginning to write and has banned all vowels from his phonic transcriptions. His handwriting isn’t his alone—the dead are there too, pulling at the shape of each letter, refusing the entire business of meaning. There are places in Kimberly’s father’s journals “that slant dramatically to the right and become tighter.” “Who is to say my father’s afterlife isn’t my life moving in real time with this written text?” She writes. Truly, there is nothing unsayable, since the unsayable can only be intuited through what can be said—an inversion that pegs absence to a particular presence, signaling a totality that remains otherwise imperceptible. I don’t know if the argument makes sense. It doesn’t matter. What matters is refusing to indulge in what Kimberly calls the anti-commons, “elite softness and alignment,” keeping language where it belongs: on the page, in the room, belligerent and disorienting in open, collective study. Graphic notes that carry within themselves ancient and future lives trespass into the present, widening our perceptive and auditory fields with new, illegible information.
—Mirene Arsanios, The Poetry Project, author of The Autobiography of a Language
Conversations and presentations
The Many Meanings of the Poetic: an interview conducted by Leo Kreider at Poets House [pdf].
Listen to a conversation with Miriam Atkin, closing with a reading from Dread Poem, on her radio show and podcast, Specific Objects: Talks on Art in the Catskills.
Listen to an excerpt from Traceable Relation [A grasp of the neither-foreign-nor-familiar] on Bandcamp.
Watch a reading from Traceable Relation, Room Tone, Dread Poem at Poets House.
Watch a reading of Dread Poem in full at The Poetry Project.
Commentaries
Mike Corrao’s cover design with my asemic writing is included in Spine Magazine’s September 2025 Uni-Press Round-Up [pdf].
Excerpts and early versions
Traceable Relation [To stay inside to attend to the more proximal inside] on Poetry Daily [pdf]
Composition commissioned for Triple Canopy’s Live Feed 2.
W9NCD in Bæst [pdf + jpeg]
from Traceable Relation [That one Ani DiFranco song] in 9 Poems [pdf]
from Dread Poem in Tripwire [pdf]
A modified squat [01:14:20]; Germinal [01:27:50] in Bone Bouquet [pdf]
Traceable Relation [Footsteps amplify silent attention], Paradiso Reading Series broadside [pdf] and in A Perfect Vacuum [pdf]
Composition II (text + visual poem after Christina Quisumbing Ramilo’s Composition] in Ursula, Issue 8 [pdf]
ROOM TONE, Belladonna Chaplet #297 [pdf]
Heavenly Hibiscus [01:04:00]; Fire [00:56:42] in Harp & Altar [pdf 1, 2]
Voice Noise: a multichannel English (Philippines)-Filipino language Google Doc speech-to-text transcription of recorded calls + training videos, a collaboration with Jesse Chun, in Juf [pdf]
From “Twelve Poets,” Ursula Magazine.
