Sol E Roussel lives and works in the hills northwest of Los Angeles, between cinema, photography, and the sentence, in three languages that have learned to interrupt one another politely. The books begin as records — inventories, schedules, transcripts of ordinary days — and keep the mistakes those records make, the way a photographer keeps the frame the light ruined. Trained in the moving image and employed in the watching of it, Roussel treats repetition the way other writers treat plot, and holds that a single family, fully attended, will yield more than any invention. The subject, as always, is attention — what it costs, whom it misses, and what it leaves on the counter afterward.
Publications forthcoming.