Johannes Göransson
The Sugar Book
A Small Press Distribution Best Seller
Fiction | Poetry | Other
208 pages. Paperback. 2015
Excerpts: Ampersand | Denver Quarterly | Fanzine | Lana Turner | Montevidayo | Phoebe | Similar Peaks | The Volta
Doubling down on his trademark misanthropic imagery amid a pageantry of the unpleasant, Johannes Göransson strolls through a violent Los Angeles in this hybrid of prose and verse…. The motifs are plentiful and varied, including constant reworkings of image-driven ideas, among them prostitution, pubic hair, Orpheus, law, pigs, disease, Francesca Woodman … and the speaker’s hunger for cocaine and copulation….. Fans of Göransson’s distorted poetics will find this a productive addition to his body of work. (Publishers Weekly)
Johannes Göransson
The Sugar Book
A Small Press Distribution Best Seller
Fiction | Poetry | Other
208 pages. Paperback. 2015
Excerpts: Ampersand | Denver Quarterly | Fanzine | Lana Turner | Montevidayo | Phoebe | Similar Peaks | The Volta
Doubling down on his trademark misanthropic imagery amid a pageantry of the unpleasant, Johannes Göransson strolls through a violent Los Angeles in this hybrid of prose and verse…. The motifs are plentiful and varied, including constant reworkings of image-driven ideas, among them prostitution, pubic hair, Orpheus, law, pigs, disease, Francesca Woodman … and the speaker’s hunger for cocaine and copulation….. Fans of Göransson’s distorted poetics will find this a productive addition to his body of work. (Publishers Weekly)
Sends its message like a mail train. Visceral Surrealism. His end game is an exit wound. (Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle, Fanzine) As savagely anti-idealist as Burroughs or Guyotat or Ballard. (James Pate, Entropy Magazine) Takes the reader far beyond their comfort zone, as poetry should. Just like Los Angeles herself, the poems inhabit that glittering/grotesque duality of Kardashian Family and Manson Family. (Carleen Tibbetts, American Microreviews) I’m not sure that even Rimbaud would title a poem “My Sperm Gets in the Flowers” (Johnny Payne, Cleaver Magazine) convulses wildly like an animal that has eaten the poem’s interior and exterior all together with silver. bang bang. (Kim Hyesoon) These poems made me cry. So sad and anxious and genius and glarey bright. (Rebecca Loudon)
Sends its message like a mail train. Visceral Surrealism. His end game is an exit wound. (Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle, Fanzine) As savagely anti-idealist as Burroughs or Guyotat or Ballard. (James Pate, Entropy Magazine) Takes the reader far beyond their comfort zone, as poetry should. Just like Los Angeles herself, the poems inhabit that glittering/grotesque duality of Kardashian Family and Manson Family. (Carleen Tibbetts, American Microreviews) I’m not sure that even Rimbaud would title a poem “My Sperm Gets in the Flowers” (Johnny Payne, Cleaver Magazine) convulses wildly like an animal that has eaten the poem’s interior and exterior all together with silver. bang bang. (Kim Hyesoon) These poems made me cry. So sad and anxious and genius and glarey bright. (Rebecca Loudon)
About the Author
Johannes Göransson is the author of four books with Tarpaulin Sky Press — Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate (2011), Haute Surveillance (2013), The Sugar Book (2015), and Poetry Against All (2020) — in addition to three previous collections of poems: A New Quarantine Will Take My Place, Dear Ra, Pilot (“Johann the Carousel Horse”) He has also translated several books, including Aase Berg’s Hackers, Dark Matter, Transfer Fat, and With Deer as well as Ideals Clearance by Henry Parland and Collobert Orbital by Johan Jönson.
Göransson emigrated with his family from Skåne, Sweden to the United States at age 13. He earned a BA from the University of Minnesota, an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his PhD from the University of Georgia. Today, in addition to writing and translating books, he teaches at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, and together with his wife, Tarpaulin Sky author Joyelle McSweeney, Göransson co-publishes Action Books.
About the Author
Johannes Göransson is the author of four books with Tarpaulin Sky Press — Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate (2011), Haute Surveillance (2013), The Sugar Book (2015), and Poetry Against All (2020) — in addition to three previous collections of poems: A New Quarantine Will Take My Place, Dear Ra, Pilot (“Johann the Carousel Horse”) He has also translated several books, including Aase Berg’s Hackers, Dark Matter, Transfer Fat, and With Deer as well as Ideals Clearance by Henry Parland and Collobert Orbital by Johan Jönson.
Göransson emigrated with his family from Skåne, Sweden to the United States at age 13. He earned a BA from the University of Minnesota, an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his PhD from the University of Georgia. Today, in addition to writing and translating books, he teaches at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, and together with his wife, Tarpaulin Sky author Joyelle McSweeney, Göransson co-publishes Action Books.