de Borja, Raymond: the dust of a contact that is everywhere

Bunny, paperback

Publication Date: March 24, 2026

Publisher Marketing: the dust of a contact that is everywhere moves between theoretical reflection and aesthetic practice through essays, fragments, daybook entries, and lyrical experiments. It explores attention, the temporality of lyric lines, and the ethical implications of how we read, write, and live beside others. Collage and drift function as both method and ethic; friendship becomes a form of nonhierarchical inquiry. Drawing on artists and thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and Toru Takemitsu, the book is a capacious and intimate work of reading understood as a form of radical attentiveness.

"Out of language forged from attentive engagements with philosophy, art, and poetry, Raymond de Borja takes us to this place of moving potentiality, this occasion that is the dust of a contact that is everywhere. Intertwining friendship with form, de Borja traces and teases out the threads of this lush correspondence, moving the reader to apprehend the various kinships inscribed in poems as well as poetry's peculiar means to convene and cultivate kinships. Alongside a keen awareness of the "feeble outer power" of poems, de Borja offers a compelling demonstration of the ways that poetry reworks how we sense and make sense of the world, refuting the seemingly ineluctable capture by empire and capital of our very capacity to perceive. To read this book is to experience the kindness and generosity of a true friendship, as it invites the reader to inhabit a "shared, common strangeness" that I take to be a hope-filled "space in which we could live a creative life."--Conchitina Cruz