10/28/16

B. R. Yeager - Genocidal businessmen. Apocalyptic visions. CGI-coated violence. Teenage follies. B.R. Yeager’s poetry collection Worlds of Ruin explores the role of violence in pop culture and modern society with frenetic energy and staggering lyricism





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B. R. Yeager, Worlds of Ruin, Five Quarterly, 2015.




Click here to read WORLDS OF RUIN
bryeager.wordpress.com/


When one plays a game, they inhabit what Johan Huizinga refers to as the ‘Magic Circle’–a world that exists with its own set of rules that the gamer must abide by. Worlds of Ruin is an experiment in what happens when that circle is broken: the quest-like nature and the brutality of the grind seeps into our every day lives in ways we don’t always expect. However, beyond the rubble, some magic has also found its way here, too. - Brian Oliu

Open doors and descend. No pause. Just repeat. B.R. Yeager’s Worlds of Ruin delivers blood, dirt, bodies, infected desires, un-pretty things that gleam darkly, unexpectedly. This is a landscape of bodily fluids and fears painted in muted palettes and anti-heroes who find only the tiniest moments of respite and victory. Read this book as if it were a video game — keep playing and when you get to the end, begin again. - Georgia Bellas


Praise from Newark Academy Student Guest Staff for Worlds of Ruin:
Genocidal businessmen. Apocalyptic visions. CGI-coated violence. Teenage follies. B.R. Yeager’s poetry collection Worlds of Ruin explores the role of violence in pop culture and modern society with frenetic energy and staggering lyricism. Shocking and visceral, Yeager’s poetry will change your perspective on destruction and how it affects our lives.
Do we like violence? At first glance, this question seems pretty simple to answer; an easy yes or no. Do we as human beings like violence? Well, this collection of poems forces you to question just that. Using reference to video games, movies and other sources of media, it throws you into a reconsideration of how violence works in modern society and how it affects us. Our acceptance of violence in games and our utter disgust and fear of violence in real life, contradict themselves in this eloquently written selection of poems. A beautiful sort of darkness, this read is sure to keep you.
The poetry collection Worlds of Ruin fearlessly delves into the discomfort of unrelenting, uncensored violence to create a statement against its prevalence in our present day society. By maintaining a tenuous balance between reason and rage, B.R. Yeager analyzes the correlations between society and anarchy. Through its lyrical language, this collection will teach you to see both the gruesome and beautiful aspects of violence.


Prose & Poetry

2015Gravel Waxing Moon
Vending Machine Press Milky WayThe GreeksRonGood Word
decomP magazinE Balloon
Unbroken Journal Of FliesFilmmaking
Cheap Pop Wide Ovals
Mixtape Methodology In the Building

Music Writing

2015Mixtape MethodologyMichete: Strolling Rap’s Left Hand Path
mxdwnBoots, AquariaOfficial Burnt Toast, Money is Debt (single)Roots Manuva, BleedsDenai Moore, ElsewhereMC Lars, The Zombie Dinosaur LPBig Boi/Phantogram, Big GramsKyle Lucas, Mariettak-os, Can’t Fly Without GravityChristian Rich, FW14Blackalicious, Imani Vol. 1Dr. Dre, ComptonGhostface Killah & Adrian Younge, 12 Reasons to Die IISean Anonymous & Dimitry Killstorm, Better DaysRoyal, Royal EP
AMYG new jacket2.jpg






B. R. Yeager, Amygdalatropolis, Schism Press, 2017.                                


Amygdalatropolis is a work of brilliant neurorealism in which the city is a Computer, a libidinal pornutopia voided of all bedeutung other than the residual, electronic prickling of sexual fear and auto-autistic aggression where software and synapse flicker in an endless algorithmic loop. Norburt Wiener’s apocalyptic steersman leads directly here: a psychopathological cyberutopia heading straight into the lake of fire. - Scott Wilson


Yeager’s haphephobic protagonist /1404er/ has got over reality, family or the social and moved on - to a somewhat more tenable amnion of snuff porn, clickbait and casual online scapegoating. Amygdalatropolis inhabits our post-truth heterotopia like some virulent new literary life form, perfectly tooled for the death of worlds. - David Roden


Amygdalatropolis is the most sickening, most dangerous, and most thrilling book I have read in quite some time. Its young and deviant protagonist, /1404er/, refuses to come out of his bedroom for a stretch of six years, all the while dwelling in the most sordid, hateful recesses of the internet. Upon finishing it, I began to think of it as the great social media novel, perhaps the great internet novel of our time. That I discovered it through social media in the first place is at once banal, but also a little worrying in its implications. (Is the circuit of information so entirely closed?) I read it over three days at Christmastime, utterly absorbed in the book’s nauseating aesthetic. By the time I had finished it, I could smell filth seeming to emanate from my surroundings, the furniture, perhaps from my own body. That is a credit to the author’s powers of imagination and description, I hope, and not an impugning of my housekeeping. Before the smell of filth had entirely subsided, I contacted the book’s author, B.R. Yeager, about doing an interview, and we began our correspondence.
Jacob Siefring
*
3:AM Magazine: Amygdalatropolis has a very striking image on the cover. It looks like a ruptured colon. Is it CGI?
B.R. Yeager: It’s actually a public domain photograph of parasitic worms bursting out of some intestine. I figured people should know what they’re getting into.
JS: Indeed! Like so many worms, there are a number of threads or styles of discourse that seem to weave through Amygdalatropolis. There seem to be exactly three, and they’re more or less uniformly collated from start to end: 1) the third-person narration of /1404er/’s thoughts, memories and actions, 2) online text (being mostly /1404er/ forum posts, but also from elsewhere), and 3) the dissociative italicized passages, corresponding to video games or dreams. How early on in the writing of the book did you settle on this sort of three-part, threaded structure?
BRY: The three different styles were pretty much there from the start. It emerged naturally. Structure is incredibly important for me — I don’t do a lot of plotting, but I put a lot of work into making sure different threads relate to or reflect one another. And I think it’s just more interesting to have multiple styles informing each other and breaking up the text. The book I’m currently working on uses a variation of this technique, employing three rotating first-person narrators. It’s also likely a cover for some of my deficiencies — it’s easier for me switch between styles to convey something rather than being restricted to just one.
JS: The constant switching captures a little of what it feels like to split one’s attention, constantly jumping between different texts, speed reading or scanning. Likewise, a lot of the text in Amygdalatropolis isn’t really meant to be read but skipped over, visually registered. I’m thinking precisely of the machine timestamps on the /1404er/ posts:
/1404er/ (Mon) 23:37:12 No.3085900405
u still hav the plunger vid?
/1404er/ (Mon) 18:11:07 No.1006861101 i’ve seen so many different pics and vids of what a shotgun directly to the head does, yet it still always blows my mind. Buh-dum-chh
/1404er/ (Fri) 20:13:58 No.10006901242  I fucked a deer i shot once
/1404er/ (Tue) 17:52:43 No.30857028517>>>30857028501
they shut it down prety quick and ar prob hugboxxxin it out rn but it was some pretty entertaning autism while it lasted
This is a minor point, but I would argue that the presence of this kind of text in the narrative creates a reading experience that’s more reflective of the way we all read now — by rapid visual scanning and by precisely not reading.
BRY: You bring something up that was definitely in the back of my mind while writing the book. I did want Amygdalatropolis to somewhat reflect the experience of being online, of scrolling through and between content. Having multiple threads alternating, separated by left and right text alignment, as though they were separate tabs or windows open on a desktop. And you’re absolutely right about the timestamps — not intended to be read per se, though I did go through to make sure they make sense chronologically in case anyone did bother to trace a timeline. And when /1404er/ checks his search log, there are posts that include dates to give some hint of when the book takes place. Whether these portions are read or not doesn’t really impact the story, but I still wanted to make sure they were consistent in case anyone chose to follow them.
JS: One of the most seductive things you do I think has to do with the withholding, or the utter irrelevance rather, of /1404er/’s first name. Here /1404er/ isn’t just the name of an individual but also “the place he got his name from,” an internet message board where, we’re told, “Everyone was named /1404er/.” This qualification is borne out in the time- and date-stamped message board posts, all authored by one /1404er/ or another. We’re never quite sure if a given post is the central protagonist or of other members of the chat forum. Sometimes the reader can make a logical inference, other times it’s anyone’s guess.
This aspect of your book seems to have profound implications for how we might think of identity in the Information Age. Selfhood starts to look plural, anonymous, redundant. Are these ideas that consciously informed your writing?
BRY: A lot of Amygdalatropolis more or less grew out of observation. When I started writing it, I was pretty immersed in those message boards, trying to better understand them. So this characteristic of everyone sharing the same name is very reflective of how the anonymous message boards I observed functioned. The anonymity derived from taking an indistinct name is really a practicality — a survival measure — because engaging in aberrant behavior for an extended amount of time can only be done in secret and/or anonymity.
That said, I don’t think digital anonymity only benefits malicious/antisocial behavior, nor would I advocate for a less anonymous internet. But obviously Amygdalatropolis focuses on negative rather than positive aspects of online anonymity, because that’s just where I tend to look, at least as a writer.
JS: As I was reading it, I was at a loss to situate it relative to any other novel I’ve read. Were there any important precursors in your mind? What books inspired you?
BRY: Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian was probably the biggest influence on Amygdalatroplis. My initial framework for starting the book was “Blood Meridian, but on the internet.” Just the way his writing glides from a traditional narrative to something so abstract and hallucinatory — reading McCarthy always reminds me of what text can do that other mediums can’t. And no one writes violence like he does.
JS: It seems like there are a number of moments when /1404er/ seems to perceive an interpenetration of the virtual/synthetic and the biological realms. We’re told at one point that /1404er/’s ejaculate sometimes resembles “congealed silicon”; also that the body featuring in “the first mainstream film to feature unsimulated suicide” looks like silicon to him. Conversely, in the scene in which /1404er/ drugs his mother and proceeds to bludgeon her with a hardcover book, /1404er/ almost vomits because: “She was so warm. Her body didn’t feel anything like plastic.” This sort of conflation or confusion of substances can easily be seen as a function of /1404er/’s psychological condition, his sickness no doubt, but it also seems rich in a wider philosophical sense. Of what is the substance of our world really made, especially when we spend so much of our time gazing at ephemeral text and images? How central was this interpenetration of the biological and the synthetic to your conception of the book in its early stages?
BRY: This is precisely one of the central themes I wanted to get across. This ties back to the concept of people being reduced to products. /1404er/ doesn’t see others as people, only as objects, to the extent that he may even view himself as an object. This emerges in part from his detachment from the material world — he’s forgotten/suppressed the feeling of skin. The world he chooses to inhabit is largely divorced from tactile sensation — he can only imagine what it would feel like to touch the people he sees in the videos, and he prefers to imagine their texture as plastic, or rubber, like his toys. To understand that something is more than an object — a person or animal — one opens his or herself to “the risk” (in /1404er/’s case) of empathizing with them. Similarly, we tend not to view smaller insects as animals, though they certainly fit the criteria. But killing a spider doesn’t feel the same as killing a dog — in fact, it can feel more like destroying a machine than a killing.
This reflects how we view each other online. Even with our best intentions, we often don’t see the other people we’re occupying this digital space with as genuine people; they’re bits of text and an image, or a collection of images, and we judge the whole of their existence based on that. Though you and I have talked quite a bit, and I recognize you as whole person, when I picture you in my head, I only see your Twitter profile. I know that you’re a person, I know that your existence is not confined to the internet, but I’m unable to picture you inhabiting a physical space, I’m unable to imagine what your voice sounds like, and so on. So even when we’re purposefully conscious of the disconnect between one’s digital self and their physical self, it still influences the way we view and interact with others.
The way social media exists right now creates an inherent obstacle to viewing others as full people. You almost have to consciously work against it. I choose to recognize that your online presence is just a snippet of your life. But there’s a conscious effort at work there, in seeing others as more than their online output, when it’s actually easier to simply view one’s online presence as the whole of their existence.
So even if your online presence included videos or audio, I would still only be getting a snippet of your life. And this is inherent to existence in general — the impossibility of fully knowing another person — but I feel it’s exacerbated by the internet.
JS: In her excellent introduction, artist and theorist Edia Connole situates Amygdalatropolis vis-à-vis medieval Christian suffering and the negative philosophy of Georges Bataille, including the concept of expérience intérieure (usually translated as ‘inner experience’):
For Bataille, inner experience broaches a notion of community without authority, a community that simultaneously involves a dissolution of the subject and his or her sovereignty with and as the whole; where “[t]here a man is not distinguishable in any way from others”.
Yet the experience described occurs in relative physical isolation, the anonymous non-place of the message boards and /1404er/’s stronghold. I am led to think not of Bataille, but of Pascal, and his old saw that all of men’s woes stem from their inability to sit happily alone in a room. What an idea! Of course that’s absurd, if you consider /1404er/’s particular hell.
BRY: But /1404er/ isn’t particularly satisfied by his existence, is he? And one reason we glue ourselves to our phones or compulsively scroll through articles and timelines is that we can’t bear to just sit with ourselves, right? I’m likely wrong, but I imagine Pascal is referring to the self-reflection that comes with sitting alone with oneself, which is what /1404er/ is constantly working to escape (whether he’s conscious of it or not). Importantly, /1404er/ doesn’t see his time on the boards as hell. Hell for him would be to actually take stock of who he is and how he’s become that way.
I see /1404er/ and his peers as people clumsily struggling toward this sense of pure nihilism, of this dissolution of the self, but failing miserably. Because they’re not engaged in a true nihilism — they are still concerned with how they are perceived by others (even under the cover of anonymity), chasing this idea of being warriors who lay waste to the weak and what have you, of pushing the world and feeling it push back. A teenage conception of nihilism, which makes sense, given the subjects.
JS: Is thinking about Bataille or his ideas useful to you? I ask this because, much to its credit, your book has not the least trace of what might be called theoretical language; however aptly Bataille’s ideas might describe aspects of Amygdalatropolis, as the introduction shows, there’s no indication that they influenced it in any way.
BRY: I’ve read a little Bataille, but to be honest I’m not really a huge theory guy. I find a lot of it interesting, and I’m sure it informs my writing to some degree, but I’m still mainly interested in telling stories. So you’re correct in that Bataille’s ideas didn’t explicitly influence my writing for Amygdalatropolis. If anything, it was more informed by Aimé Césaire and Marx (specifically, discourse surrounding humans becoming reduced to objects). But still, the immediate process was far more anthropological, always rooted in observing behaviors of posters on the boards.
That said, Edia’s use of Bataille to contextualize Amygdalatropolis, and this tradition of using images of suffering as a means for transcendence or dissolution of self, is something I find fascinating. Her introduction actually allowed me to look at the book in a new light, which is an incredibly rare experience.
JS: Yes, I see what you mean: self-reflection, or self-consciousness, can itself be a sort of hell. The moments in the narrative that struck me as most hellish were of course the centipede chapter, which I took to be the climax of the book; but also /1404er/’s awful hesitation at how to go about ordering a pizza — would he have to speak? To speak, to form words aloud in the presence of another, would then be hell. Or, to a lesser degree, even to be seen, as by the deliverymen.
Regarding the message boards that you observed, and that provided a rough model for the /1404er/ forum: are these on the open web, viewable by anyone, or membership access only?
BRY: So there’s this split between wanting to be seen by one’s peers as powerful, ruthless, without conscience, and simultaneously this desire to become invisible — to be nameless and unseen. This has emerged out of the culture of the boards.
All the boards were accessible to anyone, though some required an IP blocker to access, meaning they were part of the “deep web” (i.e. a site that cannot be found via traditional search engines or accessed with a traditional browser. Much of the content in the deep web is completely innocuous, though some sites have been set up using the limited accessibility as a means for nefarious and/or illegal activity).
One thing I should also mention, just for the sake of transparency: the forum posts throughout Amygdalatropolis are a mix of original texts as well as pieces directly lifted from actual posts, re-written and composited (in about equal measure). I’m not sure if anyone would have an issue with that from a creative standpoint, or if anyone would cry “plagiarism” over it, but I figure it’s best to be open.
JS: Yes, in /1404er/ there is this very palpable desire to see the world, everything, all of its intensity, but always without exposing oneself to the view of others. To be, in short, an all-seeing but disembodied eye; this idea seems ancient, but yet hard to place. I mean, it sounds like one definition of God, right? An all-seeing but invisible eye? In the introduction Edia Connole makes this sort of potential equation between /1404er/ and God explicit. Perhaps it’s just an impossible fantasy of disembodied knowledge. Inscribing that very impossibility, there’s the doctrine of Esse est percipi (“To be is to be perceived”), attributed to George Berkeley.
I wonder if the ‘cybernetic’/digital revolution has perhaps intensified this will to disembodiment in our culture. I certainly think so. But how? Because we can be physically alone yet experience so many forms of television and telepresence now? This is of course getting towards the beautiful and concluding passage of your book, in which /1404er/ accesses 17,043 live webcams distributed across the globe — a version of seeing all, if you will. Without being able to put too fine a point on it, I wonder if the cyberspace/meatspace duality couldn’t be described as another iteration of the Cartesian flesh/spirit, mind/matter split.
BRY: Your first observations tie in closely with the book’s second epigraph. This desire to not only see the world but to impose one’s will onto it, often through extreme violence, without recourse, is something I see as inherent to Western culture. Importantly, violence is not just a tool, but an end unto itself. So while /1404er/ and his peers may seem like outliers to the rest of Western society, they’re actually quite in line with it, in this respect. The colonies certainly served practical purposes (enriching the colonizers and such), but they also allowed “sober and orderly” individuals to behave monstrously without tarnishing their reputations in polite society. For all intents and purposes, the colonies allowed them the anonymity necessary to pursue these desires. Ultimately my point is that /1404er/’s behaviors and attitudes don’t originate in a vacuum — they’re in fact rooted in the broader society and its traditions. So rather than using colonies as a means to entertain violent desires, /1404er/ and the like use the boards.
When I write fiction I tend to be more interested in sowing questions and uncertainty rather than providing answers. That said, I’ve thought a lot about cyberspace in relation to omniscience — or the bargain-bin knockoff of omniscience cyberspace can provide — or in relation to Bentham’s panopticon and Foucault’s writing on the matter. A desire to be God suggests more than omniscience, though — it implies authority. The concept of the panopticon — specifically the central tower — is also inextricably tied to authority, in addition to omniscience. Within the context of the panopticon, obviously anyone would rather be the person in the tower than the prisoner down below. /1404er/ and his peers are more or less seeking to become the person in the tower.
This is something you might find funny. Researching the book made me extremely paranoid. Because when you visit any site, even if you’ve taken precautions, you can’t necessarily know for sure that someone isn’t pulling information from you. And because I was visiting so many sites centered around ruining people, I got it in my head that someone might pull my info from visitor IP logs or something and try to do something wretched to me. A couple nights when I had insomnia, I became convinced that someone was hacking me, and spent the entire night combing through the system log until I realized I was just being crazy.
Anyway, about an hour ago I got a flash of it again, and for just a hot minute considered the possibility that you were a super-elaborate troll doing some social engineering on me. Which is ridiculous. But the fucked up part is that there are totally people who would set up a super-legit looking Twitter account, a super-legit looking website, create a whole bunch of content and gain a whole bunch of followers just to fuck with people. Writing that book definitely wrecked my ability to feel okay on the internet. - Jacob Siefring  www.3ammagazine.com/3am/digital-native-interview-b-r-yeager-amygdalatropolis/

John Colasacco is equal parts savant, madman, and humanist. The fiction he writes for the page may very well be the biographies of individuals from a parallel universe. Colasacco is channeling something utterly unique and it would be foolish of you not heed his words

Two Teenagers

John Colasacco,  Two Teenagers, Horse Less Press, 2016.

"I like this book a lot. I found a lot of surprises in the way the sentences worked. I was taken down a path cognitively and then thrust into a situation that made me use my psychedelic brain. I like being asked to do that. TWO TEENAGERS seeks the dust and doorways that evoke emotive meaning. Each sentence unfolds new emotions through a kind of paced, unique, symbolic logic. Measurable phenomena + the liquid in which the answer skinny dips. Verificationism + a tree that survives on echoes. This book is full of feelings I'd forgotten I'd had."—Sommer Browning


You can read some excerpts from TWO TEENAGERS at Tarpaulin Sky  +
www.nightblockmag.com/colasacco/
www.birdfeastmagazine.com/eleven/colasacco.html
www.cosmonautsavenue.com/four-poems-by-john-colasacco/

Excerpts:
Two teenagers turn around quickly expecting to see blue sparks or a person walking toward a house in an open field.
The rest of the day moves slowly while a paper lantern floats off and a young girl with graying hair bends down to kiss the sand.
There is a wound somewhere filling up with the sound of silent letters and the feeling of being too far away from a bridge.
By the time the fireflies come out someone has died on their way back to a great body of water but no one has been able to sense their absence yet.

*
Two teenagers come outside for a while and sit in the sun where people talk about what they’re going to do with the rest of their lives.
In the distance the white car they’re all driving travels along a suburban road at a tremendous speed.
When they get to the beach there’s a window that’s not attached to a house and the ocean makes the sound of footsteps running up stairs.
They stop to take a breath not knowing that somewhere they are being thought of under moonlight by a twelve-year-old with a face like evening.
*
Two teenagers in bed with someone they have never seen in the light open their hands and dream of the souvenir shops.
They stop thinking about what it’s all right to like while a rabbit stands among trees watching over them.
The colors in their heads and the smell of the backyard are like an old friend pretending to kiss a shadow trapped in glass.
They want to say something about walking across the world from one sea to the next through the all the emptiness that’s been taken out of them.
*
Two teenagers run away together to a place where all the lonely are slaughtered.
When they get there, they find a table and a tree.
They leave a piece of bread on the counter in a bit of shadow, thinking that it expresses something they can’t articulate.
Soon an argument starts over whether the table has been brought outside or the tree is growing indoors.
On the table, an empty wine glass trembles.
*
Two teenagers disappear into a parking lot looking over their shoulders as though they are afraid someone has seen them.
Next to the parking lot is a three-story house with a faint grinding noise coming from inside.
A warm breeze blows as a woman with an accent whispers something to the whole world, first into one ear, then the other.
The wind dies down just long enough to make out what she’s saying.
“I used to live in that house.”
*
Two teenagers accidentally separate from each other somewhere in the parking lot.
Then night falls, and the parking lot empties, leaving only seagull feathers and broken glass.
By the light of the moon they track each other’s footprints the wrong direction until they are too tired to walk anymore.
“I’ll just wait here by this seagull feather,” one says.
Miles away the other rubs half a lightbulb until it glows.


Antigolf

John Colasacco, Antigolf, Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2015.                              
"John Colasacco's Antigolf is not the opposite of golf or golf's antithesis. It is the world as if the world were a kind of game. It is both extremely important and completely pointless. It will make you think you are dreaming while you are reading it. Let's put things in a house. Now the house is full. Your mother is a tree. The piano fails as an instrument but fits nicely into the pool. And it's terrifying." - Chris Kennedy

www.rattle.com/the-preakness-by-john-colasacco/







informationcrusher

John Colasacco, The Information Crusher, Spuyten Duyvil Publishing, 2016.

The Information Crusher is a crushing novella that's not only haunting: it's haunted. You leave it and it lurks nearby. It follows you. It is still following me. I don't want it to stop. - Ashley Farmer

John Colasacco owns a marvelous probing voice; his writing is always inviting and surprising–a multiplicity of vivid tones, as if language consists of colors primed for revelation. - Michael Burkard

John Colasacco is equal parts savant, madman, and humanist. The fiction he writes for the page may very well be the biographies of individuals from a parallel universe. Colasacco is channeling something utterly unique and it would be foolish of you not heed his words. We'll all be living in his universe in no time. - Michael J Seidlinger

Many of our stories follow a certain structure, one that feels as though it fits with causality, or rather what we wish causality meant.  But slipping out from underneath such a definition can lead to experiencing a profound freedom of perspective.  John Colasacco’s The Information Crusher is a case study in such an experience.  The text is presented not as a puzzle with pieces meant to be rearranged “correctly” by the reader, but as the fragments of a shard of four-dimensional reality, intentionally smashed and left to create patterns based on existential whim.  No judgment is forced on these patterns.  They are allowed to be the product of random chance or the careful machinations of fate; sometimes both.  The fragments have connective tissue that is readily apparent, but that tissue is not so binding as to prevent the reader from creating her or his own meaning.
If that point sounds intellectually vague, it is because The Information Crusher is so open to personal interpretation that any attempt to rigidly define it is terribly vulnerable to counterattack by contradiction.  Is this book written in prose, poetry, or prose poetry?  Are there multiple perspectives in the novel or is it a singular mind smashed into tense and time fragments like the text itself?  Is the narrator only one of the characters or the author in some grandly mutated autobiography?  Does the narrator address the reader or one of the characters, or does the act of reading the text make require the reader to become a character in Colasacco’s story?  The real power of this book lies in, rather effortlessly, making the reader ask all of these questions while retaining both interest and intrigue.  The whole of The Information Crusher explores the fluidity of identity, be it with respect to sexuality, gender, childhood, parenthood, siblinghood, friendship, cosmology, or biology, and it consistently remarks on the inadequacy of outdated definitions – “In the middle of the night you were amazed your mother’s clothes would go onto you just as easily as your own”.  There is a story in the text, one of jealousy and consequence and need for acceptance, but discovering that story is akin to seeing the pieces of a former vase present in a mosaic.
There is a moment in the mosaic in which one of the primary characters falls off of a bridge that, for reasons made apparent through the novel, has a very direct metaphorical resonance.  It is not entirely clear whether or not the fall happens before or after the events that make the fall poignant, but that is part of the point.  The character injures his arm and says “But I wouldn’t admit to myself it was broken.  I could see and hear that it was broken, but I refused to accept it.  It felt like air blowing into a part of my armpit it had never touched before, nothing worse than that”.  In the interest of creating subjective meaning from a novel that embodies subjective perspective, I see that quote as a critical theme running through the text.  The character, a proxy for us, cannot accept that his body, his reality, his sense of self is broken.  He has been presented with the sharpness of circumstance, that existence is not the neatly structured arrangement he took for granted, and he refuses to accept it – until, of course, he later passes out from the pain and injury that he refuses to acknowledge.  This whole novel can be seen as a struggling and, at times, very brutal effort to escape from underneath a dominant ideology, as well as the violent, ignorant, and instinctive resistance against such movement.
This book deserves multiple reads from each of its readers, and readers of this book deserve to give themselves multiple angles from which it experience it.  Like a puzzle with disfigured pieces or an unfastened mosaic, The Information Crusher paints a new picture with each pass, many of which I doubt even Colasacco intended.  It is one of the most thoroughly engaging novels I have ever read, not because of immersion or agreeable tone, but because it has the frankness and trust in the intelligence of its readers required to make demands of them.  It challenges you, in what language it chooses to include and leave out, in how it presents itself as a beautifully and intentionally unfinished idea, and in what river bank it deposits you on at the end. -

More:
enclave.entropymag.org/finalpoem-from-john-colasacco/
www.onmetatron.org/poetry/john-colasacco-boston-vs/
witness.blackmountaininstitute.org/issues/volume-28-no-2-summer-2015/the-boy-who-didnt-wash/
sleepingfish.net/13/037_Colasacco.htm

10/26/16

Marc Anthony Richardson has found a way to describe in words the inability to understand other people—he uses dense prose that circles on itself and leaps from present to flashback, depicting a muddled mind at work

Year of the Rat
Marc Anthony Richardson, Year of the Rat, Fiction Collective 2, 2016.
excerpt
read it at Google Books
www.marcanthonyrichardson.com/


Winner of the FC2 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize
In Year of the Rat, an artist returns to the dystopian city of his birth to tend to his invalid mother only to find himself torn apart by memories and longings. Narrated by this nameless figure whose rants, reveries, and Rabelaisian escapades take him on a Dantesque descent into himself, the story follows him and his mother as they share a one-bedroom apartment over the course of a year.
Despite his mother’s precarious health, the lingering memories of a lost love, an incarcerated sibling, a repressed sexuality, and an anarchic inability to support himself, he pursues his dream of becoming an avant-garde artist. His prospects grow dim until a devastating death provides a painful and unforeseeable opportunity. With a voice that is poetic and profane, ethereal and irreverent, cyclical and succinct, he roams from vignette to vignette, creating a polyphonic patchwork quilt of a family portrait.

Two hundred and some-odd pages of… something.
This debut novel by Philadelphia-based writer and artist Richardson won the FC2 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest for 2015, for what it’s worth. For mainstream readers, it will be virtually unreadable. Written in some sort of flash fiction/automatic writing style, the book is essentially one long rant punctuated by untranslated Latin phrases, footnotes nodding to sources ranging from F. Scott Fitzgerald to the Bible, and the occasional reproduction of an abstract painting. Technically, there’s a plot: a 35-year-old artist returns to the city of his birth to care for his ailing mother. “Sick women live forever,” he bemoans. Other than those basics, the book is violently difficult to parse. Early on, our nameless narrator spits on a little girl. “I forget her name: a name is nothing more than a cage. She is the archetype stuck between Scylla and Charybdis, an ungodly urban ugliness and a tumultuous racial myth: black sloth.” Later, musings on art: “Squinting is god. It negates detail and yet proposes it. It reduces everything to simple geometric shapes, the building blocks of a good drawing, revealing only the foundation the very thing that makes a thing what it is.” Still later, the protective son: “I want to shield you the way I want to shield the virginity of my mother who has not yet consummated her marriage to death, for whenever I imagine her without her fold-up shopping cart, waddling up walks and wheezing with quadpod canes and walkers, with pocket books and packages and plastic grocery sacks, her body, when she tries to do anything for herself I tell her she’s going to fall.” The book is certainly unique in voice and style, but it’s also frightening, ugly, dense, and borderline offensive. Even the most challenging of transgressive writers pales in comparison with the aimless rambling at work here.
Technically a novel, it will make all but the most experimental of readers throw it across a room. -
Kirkus Reviews

The unnamed narrator of Richardson's first novel returns to his unspecified home city to live with and care for an ailing mother in a cramped apartment. Over the course of a year, readers watch him navigate a return to his own history. The narrator's older brother is obsessed with status and religion and his younger brother is in jail; he himself is a failing artist and an alcoholic, and possibly has other mental health issues. Like Gogol's Poprishchin, the narrator is combative, racist, judgmental, self-hating, misogynistic, and overtly sexual. He makes decisions based on a code that is difficult to understand. Richardson has found a way to describe in words the inability to understand other people—he uses dense prose that circles on itself and leaps from present to flashback, depicting a muddled mind at work. Richardson effortlessly weaves quotes from a wealth of other texts into his work, creating in his narrator a sort of human callback to Western culture, or an embodiment of Ezra Pound's Cantos. The novel is certainly challenging, but once readers enter the story it's easy to be swept into its stormy momentum, and to acknowledge the very promising start of the author's career.
- Publishers Weekly

“Trust me, you've never read anything like Marc Anthony Richardson's Year of the Rat, and you must stop everything you're doing right now and make time for it. Gorgeous, unsparing, heartbreaking, the book is a prose poem of a testament to motherhood, to manhood, to lost generations, to hope itself."
Cristina García

"In language that is at times phantasmagoric, at times ribald, and always beautiful, Marc Anthony Richardson's debut novel astounds. Bold, provocative, and ambitious: we have a new, indispensable voice in American letters."—Micheline Aharonian Marcom


“Here is the debut of a breathtaking talent, a writer of relentless intelligence and vision. Marc Anthony Richardson’s writing is at once ecstatic and gritty, fierce and tender, gorgeous and as potent as a bomb.” —Carolina De Robertis

“As word-drunk as Joyce, as sharp-eyed as Ellison, Richardson has a mesmerizing voice that grabs you by the ears and won’t let go. This poignant tale of a young man’s devotion to his family while he struggles to succeed in a surreal art world introduces Richardson as an important new voice.” — Cornelia Nixon

"Haunted by the sign (maria) of the moon, Marc Anthony Richardson's remarkable and necessary debut, Year of the Rat, is an abject linguistic entity scrabbling through a complex underworld of love and disgust—a world of damaged, systematically marginalized black bodies from which Richardson's narrator continuously rises, bringing news, rage, and redemption in beauty and the irresistible connections of family."—Michael Mejia

Ádám Lovász - a wonderful mashup of critique and mysticism, deconstruction and speculative realism. It's like Dialectic of Enlightenment on bad acid and crammed with scientific research

Image result for Márk Horváth and Ádám Lovász, The Isle of Lazaretto,
Márk Horváth and Ádám Lovász, The Isle of Lazaretto, Schism Press, 2016.


twitter.com/AdamRefuter


Books are there to amaze us: Márk Horváth and Ádám Lovász have certainly done that. I'm not sure I've read a more paranoiacally invigorating and inclusive text since Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia. This book is a wonderful mashup of critique and mysticism, deconstruction and speculative realism. It's like Dialectic of Enlightenment on bad acid and crammed with scientific research. The reach of scholarship in here amazes me: we’ve got OOO and Deleuze, but we also have Lyotard and Irigaray and Blanchot. This book is an invaluable polemic against the idea that breaking down the boundaries between things is always best. Global warming is doing an excellent job of reducing the “islands of ice” (the icebergs) to their oceanic environments. Is that good?– Timothy Morton


This book exhibits the beauty of a random encounter between a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table; it is consistent with its self-inflicted predicament: the shadow of Maldoror haunts it like it should, no less, no more, lightly and deeply. At this particular juncture (passim), Mark Horvath and Adam Lovasz write: Immanence has become horrific, but this does not mean that we should seek and escape from the terror. (114). I endorse it like any poet would, in awe of its dramatic mastery over nihilism, . Junking Isidore-the-first, I offer: may it please heaven that the reader, emboldened, and become momentarily as fierce as what he reads, find without loss of bearing a wild and sudden way across the desolate swamps of these somber, poison-filled pages; for unless he brings to his reading a rigorous poetry and a tautness of mind equal at least to his wariness, the deadly emanations of this book will dissolve his soul as water does sugar. All we need to know is what is digesting the mummies (45) that, and injection of 5T increase aggression in crayfish (56), the rest only means that withdrawal has THE UPPER HAND in this battle (64). At some point during this glorious Saturday morning of my reading, entranced by its verb, I invoked Ah Pook the destroyer himself and shouted “on reparation do carbuncle, in it euphemism, and rendition my bootleg”. By the power of junk, may they be blessed. For them like me, for us then – “necronauts, modern lovers of debris, radio and jetstreams—there is only one option, to let things thing, to let matter matter, to let the orange orange and the flower flower… speak about the thing itself and not just ideas about the thing, of saying ‘jug, bridge, cigarette, oyster, fruitbat, windowsill, sponge’.” To my pleasure, they added: Menger sponge (73). Lazaretto Island, formerly known as Agios Dimitrios (after the military saint and martyr) before it became the name of a suburb, successively bearer of a monastery, a leprosarium, a military hospital, another, the same, leprosarium, a concentration camp, the headquarters of the Italian army, a small church, and a wall against which those condemned to death were shot, is the heraldic arms of its vortex, the Menger sponge of its past, present, and future. Given the chance, when all the souls of the drowned refugees, soldiers, prisoners, and other martyrs of history will find transitory shelter somewhere else, in the company of other illness-boxes set free of their miseries, a self-sufficient community of onanistic-sex-craving Gynoids will colonize it. The Isle of Lazaretto will be their breviary. – Isidore Sebastian


Ádám Lovász, The System of Absentology in Ontological Philosophy, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016.
extract (pdf)


This volume deals primarily with absentology, an ontological and social-scientific epistemological mode, dedicated to the analysis of absence. The book is drawn by manifestations of absence wherever they may be encountered. It deals with three terms, the shadow economy, corruption and pollution, while constructing a non-realist ontology predicated upon the emptiness of all predicates, as expounded by certain strands of Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. According to the absentological viewpoint, there is nothing outside, beyond, below or above relations. Relations exist on their own, enchained within an immense, infinite regress, opening and closing upon one another. Absentology is, by consequence of its nonattachment to phenomena, a form of social inquiry fundamentally alien to each and every social form, and it abandons any illusions about the possibility of an escape from the realm of relationality. This book will appeal to students and academics interested in ontological philosophy.


"Burning all it touches in the fires of omnipotent passivity from which nothing - not even the nothing itself - will ever escape, Adam Lovasz's System of Absentology is an apotheotic orgy of synthetic thought or 'philo-mutational analysis.' Ringing with alchemical newness and unborn anonymity, the voice of this text respires with the wayward fidelity and breathless conviction of a new Eriugena, writ(h)ing like a void-cold serpent in the love-infested, mystical white ash of philosophy and religion. We the inexistent joyfully stamp it with a hyper-Petrine, inverted papal imprimatur, repeating words that the Periphyseon, some three centuries after its composition, sucked from the mouth of Honorius III: totus scatens vermibus haereticae pravitatis - wholly swarming with worms of heretical perversity." - Nicola Masciandaro


"The Hidden God plays hide and seek. Can one capture the net-weaver with words? This Trickster god is a tricky god, whose shapes shift and whose faces vanish when one tries to define them. Adam Lovasz has dedicated most of his heart, and much of his work, attempting to evoke the unsayable with words of rare beauty and passion. One cannot define this Hidden God, who created all definitions with invisible escapes. But if he or she or it or they cannot be defined, they can be surrounded and seen, sometimes darkly, but sometimes as bright as a butterfly. Adam Lovasz has drawn those shapes and faces the Hidden God channels, and has taken the clearest photographs of ghosts that I have seen for a long, long time. This is a gorgeous and disconcerting book." - David Tibet
Image result for Ádám Lovász, Tracing the Inoperative: Outlines of a Non-Oriented-Ontology,

Ádám Lovász, Tracing the Inoperative: Outlines of a Non-Oriented-Ontology, 2015.


This book seeks to introduce a new philosophical concept: Non-Oriented-Ontology. Our lives are pervaded by a sense of absence. This new discipline of philosophy seeks to make the presence of absence truly tangible through a variety of examples. From Bible-burning Zimbabwean Christians to junk DNA, misbehaving prep boys to black holes, 'Tracing the Inoperative' paints a complex picture of the various absences that surround us, and attempts in the process to construct a mode of interpretation that would be adequate to fully grasping the sheer amount of absence we find ourselves surrounded with, while also striving to transmit an understanding of events that makes us capable of embracing these many and diverse forms of emptiness. In the final instance, the best way to fill absence is to accept the invitation of the black hole and enter into its realm, a world that resembles our own in more ways than one...


//What would our message be? What is the goal of the discourse we intend to present to the reader? Our discourse contains the explication of what we call Non-Oriented-Ontology (N.O.O.), a concept of philosophy hitherto unknown, at least in this verbiage. We denote as „non-oriented” anything that pertains to an immanent negativity, any event, be it a singularity or a process, that leads to an increase in entropy, leading, ultimately, to an apotheosis that explicates the givenness of Emptiness. „Ontology” entails anything observable, for we limit ourselves to interpretation of events and processes that are, in some manner, empirically observable and measurable to anthropomorphic actants (“scientists”). Otherwise, this work would degenerate into idle speculation. Although we are not opposed to speculation, and find nothing wrong with engaging in philosophical free-thinking from time to time, we feel it is nevertheless important to stress that this work only incorporates that which may be observed in some way by perception. Nevertheless, the postulation of a vista in no way limits perception to what is merely human. The interactions of objects play a very important role in this discourse. In summary, the non-oriented is the horizon of warming; a warming that is, as will become apparent, that is far more general than what is commonly known as „global warming”. From a methodological standpoint, we would utilize an intensive science, a scientific discourse that is, in spite of its discipline, crazy and, through its craziness, open to speculation. (DeLanda 2002) Intensive science is, in our use of the term, a „crazy wisdom” akin to the concept as outlined by Chögyam Trungpa. (Trungpa 2001) Crazy wisdom would denote a knowledge that seeks to go beyond all boundaries, while nevertheless not degenerating into complete insanity. It is wisdom, but an unbound, limitless wisdom, a discourse that does not restrict itself, without thereby compromising its own disciplinedness. It is right concentration, achieved through an intensification of preexisting conceptualizations and experimentations. Crazy wisdom is the density of appreciation, the intensification of a knowledge pertaining to givenness. Through utilization of these two concepts, intensive science and crazy wisdom, we hope to arrive at knowledge and acceptance of the given. – Introduction, Tracing the Inoperative //


“All things are alike in their difference, all of the same abyssal signature. As such, our own book cannot hope for any unique ontological status. All is emptiness. Nevertheless, at this juncture, how would we nevertheless recommend it to the reader? How should Tracing the Inoperative be bisected, dissected, or…? Every language partakes of the night, a night where there are no living witnesses or strata. Those layers of interpretation, those games of signification that do flitter around the void are principles of non-encoding, always already decoded fragments, materials that testify to the impossibility of any systematic, purified rendition. Our discourse, one that may be termed „absentological”, is an interdisciplinary exercise in nonstandard hybrid thought. Of the materials contained within, not one equates to anything more than what one might call a system of nonactions addressed to our own death, and the world’s foreclosure. We cannot, indeed, should not, attempt to reverse the absence and aggressively force it to yield its secrets. Nevertheless, in spite of this unequivocal injunction, Tracing the Inoperative nevertheless has a lot to say about epistemological and ontological issues. It is an attempt at hybrid thought, an experiment that should not be interpreted merely as a symptom of cosmic death and erasure. Yes, those too are valid ontological conditions, given in their sheer poverty. But in the book there is at stake an alternative mode of epistemology, a chaotic way of knowledge and awareness. Energy strata, once lifted, come into contact with a zone with no witnesses, a zone open to the pure immanence of proliferation and restoration. One who reads this book shall be able to visualize, through a range of meditations, systematic de-codings of each and every similarity. Behind every similarity, there is difference. And lurking behind difference is similarity. The concrete examples (and of these, there are many among the pages of our dark tract) have all been selected with one imperative in mind: namely, awareness of emptiness. For instance, when we opt to include the voices of Bible-burning Zimbabwean Christian iconoclasts, our reason for doing so is to help the reader envision a mode of belief founded upon self-exhaustion. Where all phenomena have dissipated themselves, there can be no instantiations that deviate from pure and empty Chaos. When we speak of equating each and every individual object with leaky black holes, in the manner of Graham Harman, we ourselves are exhausted in the heat of this absentological gesture. And how would „restoration” fit into the picture? Exhaustion may only occur when the end is absent, far distant from the place of our work. When a great distance separates the hollowed out One (the One-Zero) from its self-realization, each and every action comes to be viewed as futile. The black sun of universal futility cannot be escaped; death, a fiery flux already burning our cells and membranes, at varying speeds, is already in operation, even as we write these introductory statements. Death is a system of soups, a liquidity that contains mysterious connections. Tracing the Inoperative is, above all else, an attempt to delineate inoperative connections, forms of hollow communication. If there exist connections between things, autonomous webs of data, it could very well be that these bridges are the sole existents. Indeed, such is the meaning of emptiness: relations are the only true existents, relationalities with neither substance nor essence. Instead of a mesmerizing, albeit hypocrite re-encoding, our discursive strategy is a mode of unfolding raw data, treating each and every phenomenon as irreducible. We do not seek to reduce A to B, but rather, to enlighten perception and allow the integration of multiple connectivities into scientific discourse. Absentology and Non-Oriented-Ontology are fundamentally intensive sciences, accentuations of scientific data that exhaust themselves in the process of identification, independently of whatever raw material is being processed. Such an operativity, the unworking we seek to „write”, to render legible, is an inoperative transgression, a sacrilege so impotent that it unwinds itself into the night. No other presences are identified, in the final instance, the final heartbeat, apart from the immense black night, the night from where God is absent and all the stars are dead. Immanence is deferred, permanently; without reserve, without holding anything back, immanence has hurled itself into impossibility. We must follow immanence down into the reintegration of proliferation within the cosmic Womb/Tomb. It is our sincere hope that the reader shall find this book to be of help in following the traces of absent objects into that unknown kingdom.”  – Adam Lovasz
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Ádám Lovász, The Nudity of Absence: (To the Idol Worshippers), Smashwords Edition, 2015. 


Colorful in every sense of the word, The Nudity of Absence is, above all else, a work of speculative ontology. Drawing on scientific discoveries and metaphysical truths, the essays contained in this book attempt to delineate the contours of the current vacuity, emptiness and senseless negativity of the world we presently live in, while resisting the all too common imperative in most of philosophy that would force us to limit negation. Negativity is, by its very nature, limitless. The ambition of the author at this juncture, is to progressively debunk, so to speak, positive thinking through the exposition of an empirically-grounded negative ontology, a theory of being that contains nothing, for it limits itself to description of things as they are, of the very emptiness of all that is.

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Ádám Lovász, Refutation: ...or A Playful Attempt at a Dialogue Containing Various Discourses and their Deconstructions, iAuthor, 2014.  


Dear Reader,
In this book, you shall find everything from Chaos to sea snakes and much more. This is a book for free spirits, people willing to put their prejudices aside and embrace a new approach to human affairs, a recipe for a happy life that is actually older than it seems. It is a thesis of mine that all of us must choose between living as the majority does, that is, in continous self-doubt, or adopting a new solution to life's problems. The old way I chose to call Refutation, whereas the alternative solution I chose to call Oblivion. A riotous, at times even outrageous exercise in philosophy and fiction, this is a book that pushes genre limits to their breaking point. While its content may appear to be obscure, at times even random or paradoxical, it was written with a clear purpose in mind. As to what it's purpose is, I would very much like you, Dear Reader, to decide for yourself.


I am the light at the end of the tunnel. I am the water in a puddle, a torch burning in the wilderness. The words emanating from my hands are the beginning and ending, from start to finish. My writing may seem hastily-contrived, at times it even appears to be the very epitome of madness. And yes, there is madness among my lines. But the very best writing is born in the frenzied heat of insanity. Therefore, though I cannot vouch for the sanity of my work, what I can guarantee is that the books born from my pen, so to speak, are at least as richly-endowed as my mind is, if "richness" is the right term for what goes on inside of my head. In order to better direct prospective readers and better inform them of what lies in store for them, should they decide to open one of my writings, I would like to list those thinker who have influenced me most profoundly. I owe an intellectual debt to, among others, Buddha, Plato, Meister Eckhart and Friedrich Nietzsche. When the passion for knowledge burst forth from me like a stream in the summer of 2011 and I set forth on the path of spiritual realization, a path that has led me to what I believe to be Oblivion, these were the thinkers I held in my hands. Or did they hold me, this reborn soul, in theirs? Who knows? This is a mystery only the seers can have knowledge of. However, in the course of my literary development, the events and experiences of my life have shaped me even more profoundly than any readings. Very often, one encounters peculiarly familiar themes in one's readings, for the truth is common to all those with the openness to feel it. It is my firm conviction that reality must be felt, rather than known. This sums up my worldview fairly adequately.


                                                                                                                         
(Im)potentiality by Adam Lovasz

10/25/16

Lauren Hilger - a masterful expose of filmic proportions. In each poem is a film beckoning to be viewed, emotional resonance pulling you in for a full embrace

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Lauren Hilger, Lady Be Good, Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016.
laurenhilger.com/

Lauren Hilger’s debut is a masterful expose of filmic proportions. In each poem is a film beckoning to be viewed, emotional resonance pulling you in for a full embrace. Lady Be Good is a delight and declares Hilger as an important voice in contemporary poetry.
The Damascus Room
Against the ear a message from one world,
the cold of another, everything lit lurid by
skilled craftsmen. During the day, the escalators keep moving for no one. There remains that list of the last

things in the life of Prince Nikolay Bolkonsky.
Chapter 6 of The Last Tycoon.
Every other page not seen
in the book on display at the museum.

There was a message unmuted,
uninjured, talisman, all ivory hilt,
all of that paper, that manmade
tile, the window.

A seat for everyone— let’s just meet here again.

POETRY
Palinode“, Blackbird“The Dark Ages”, Massachusetts Review “Monk’s Dream”, Literary Orphans“As Tolstoy’s Natasha on the Hunt”, Berkeley Poetry Review“Spare a Traveler Some?”, The Nervous Breakdown“Claude Thornhill Composition”, Minola Review“Two Stanza Republic”Gulf Coast“Binary”North American Review“Hard Hat”“Wanted as Handled”Hunger MountainΔTime“, “On the Town (1949)“, “Double Indemnity (1944)“, Prelude (Print)
“As Vera-Ellen”“Red Paisley”“The Seven Year Itch”Prelude Online“Birthday”Four Way ReviewThree PoemsLUMINA Online“The Platonic What’s at Stake”Harvard Review Online“Exotica”The Cortland Review“The Nude as Champagne Swallow”Redivider“It Sails Off”The JournalThree Poems3:AM Magazine“The Announcement”Black Warrior Review“LHOOQ”Alaska Quarterly ReviewTwo PoemsSonora ReviewTwo PoemsThe Carolina Quarterly
COLLABORATIVE POETRY
co-authored with Kay Cosgrove
“Jumping,” “Love Poem,” and “‘The Moon Rides like a Girl—through a Topaz Town'”, Yes, Poetry“Hero Book,” “Score for Invention,” “To January,” Witch Craft Magazine“The Lap Pool”, Cosmonauts Avenue“Goodbye, Hot-Dot!”Puerto del Sol“The Emergency”Washington Square Review“Worn as a Toga”“House Guest”Cimarron Review“The Real/Polly Pocket”, “A Real Knack for It”, The Blueshift JournalInterview,  The Blueshift Journal“Flour”Salamander Magazine
ESSAYS & BOOK REVIEWS
Workers of the Real Estate Wealth Expo, North American ReviewPantry, Lilah HegnauerKenyon Review OnlineDirecting Herbert White, James Franco, DIAGRAMVideotape, Andrew Zawacki, Green Mountains Review (Print & Online)
Signaletics, Emilia Phillips, Green Mountains ReviewChapel of Inadvertent Joy, Jeffrey McDaniel, Green Mountains Review3 Sections, Vijay Seshadri, Green Mountains ReviewAs Long as Trees Last, Hoa Nguyen, The Café ReviewCompass, Luc Phinney, Green Mountains ReviewThe Imaginary City, Michael BazzettGreen Mountains ReviewCharms Against Lightning, James Arthur, The CollagistHer Familiars, Jane Satterfield, Green Mountains ReviewIn the Kingdom of the Ditch, Todd Davis, Green Mountains ReviewMayakovsky’s Revolver, Matthew Dickman, CutBankRefuge, Adrie Kusserow, Green Mountains ReviewDarkening the Grass, Michael Miller, Green Mountains ReviewDark Square, Peter Marcus, Green Mountains Review



Larissa Pham - a meditation on power and the self, in addition to being an erotic thriller

New Lovers 9: Fantasian
Larissa Pham, Fantasian, Badlands Unlimited, 2016.


larissapham.com/


An unnamed narrator’s life at Yale takes a dizzying turn when she meets a girl who looks just like her. Drawn into each other’s social worlds, they spiral deeper and deeper into a house of mirrors made of each other.


A young Asian woman's life at Yale takes a dizzying turn when she meets Dolores—her doppelgänger—at a party. As they begin to merge into each other’s social and sexual worlds, it becomes impossible to tell where one girl ends and the other begins. When Dolores' boyfriend and his twin brother enter into this pas de deux, identities and couplings spin off into a sinister and perverse web of illusions. Fantasian is Single White Female for the dawn of a new sexual fluidity.


Fantasian by Larissa Pham is one of the New Lovers, a series of short erotic fiction published by Badlands Unlimited. Inspired by Maurice Girodias’ legendary Olympia Press, New Lovers features the raw and uncut writings of authors new to the erotic romance genre. Each story has its own unique take on relationships, intimacy, and sex, as well as the complexities that bedevil contemporary life and culture today.




interview at Electric Literature


New Lovers author Larissa Pham did a piece for Catapult about the writing process behind her book, Fantasian and how writing it helped her find her creative voice:"I wrote and instead of trying to mak... more


SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Recent publications are marked with an asterisk (*).
FICTION
The Intentional
Summer Under The Bee Tree, a short story
POETRY
HWY MagazineOf Endless Distance, an ekphrasis
NONFICTION
The Nation*Tony Tulathimutte’s Worst-Case Scenarios
A Larger Life
Mask Magazine
*
How to Hurt
Fuck No One, Get Nothing

Complex Life*Why Do We Like BDSM?
Lenny LetterBreaking Down Getting Off: The Industrial Design of Vibrators(Also published at ELLE.com)
GuernicaThe Architecture of Racism at Yale University 
NerveCum Shots, a weekly column in the form of an email newsletter, June 2015 - February 2016. Archive available here.
Broadly (VICE)Working at a High-End Sex Shop
Adult MagazineHouse on FireI’m Not Myself, You See
The HairpinShowing My Hand
BuzzFeed IdeasWe Don’t Talk About Mental Illness In My Family
Notes On An Eating Disorder
Wag’s RevueThree Lessons
The Daily DotThe Two Types of Trans Women You See on Television
GOODEkene Ijeoma, the designer humanizing data for a more compassionate society (GOOD 100 issue profile)
Vulture (New York Magazine)The Venice Biennale as Let’s Go Guide
MaximThe Gentleman’s Guide to the Venice Biennale
Courting Death at the Swatch Skiers Cup
GawkerInside My Shopping Cart: Food, Culture, and Geographic Yearning
The RumpusThe ProphecyThe Last Book I Loved: The Hours
Full Stop Magazine (selected columns)S&M SellsWhere The Wild Things WentIn Praise of Tender MachinesReview: I Called Him Necktie, Milena Michiko FlasarThe Insensitivity of Autocorrect“Hey, Check Out My Blog!”: Curating Taste and the Future of ArtSnaps of America
HWY Magazine
Rooms

Vela MagazineOur Own Ocean
Yale Daily NewsThe Madama Butterfly Effect (WEEKEND cover)
IvyGateThe Problem of Consent
Out Of Order MagazineInterview with Leif Podhajsky (p.169)
Art, Lux, et Veritas: Essays, 2012 (print)“Painting,” Ad Reinhardt


YOUR DARK HEAD, MY SHED HAIRS CURLING LIKE A SIGNATURE
THE HOT MOUTH OF YOUR SLEEP LEAVING CONTRAILS ON THE PILLOW
poem, mylar, hair, pillowcase, acrylic paint, gel medium, wet n wild eyeliner jet black, bodily fluids