about absent

Editorial Board

Irwin Chen is an information architect and faculty at Parsons in New York City.

Simon DeDeo is a scientist and poet. He lives in Chicago and keeps rhubarb is susan.

Elisa Gabbert is an editor in Boston. Her chapbook, Thanks for Sending the Engine, is available from Kitchen Press.

Jo Guldi is at the University of California, Berkeley, where she works on the history of the British road network and keeps inscape.


Where do we find ourselves? in a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Experience



A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game.

Jacques Derrida, Plato's Pharmacy