congeries

My own are his pansy collages, tightly packed, edge-to-edge congeries of overlapping floral faces that give off a bright radiance as well as well as a sense of menacing, staring eyes.

Dyer’s thoughts are so restless that instead of corralling them in essays he scatters them among numbered sections, collaging “congeries of experiences, things and cultural artifacts that, for various reasons, have come to group themselves around me in a rough constellation during a phase of my life.”

Writing in the Nation, Thomas M. Disch dismissed Bright Room as part of the Public Theater’s “misbegotten aesthetic agenda” of promoting “avant-garde con artists and politically correct bores” and protested that Zillah, rather than being a dramatic character, is “a congeries of received left/activist opinions.”

A novel loosely holding together distinct histories and temporalities effectively dramatizes a society that is a congeries of ancient and new, old lore and tradition bumping up against thoroughly modern ambitions and expertise.

A congeries of information-gathering techniques, including breaking and entering, stealing, and phone-hacking, are unpardonable and can never be undertaken directly by news organizations, but if others give news organizations the fruits of such labors it’s fine to publish them.