Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate
by Johannes Göransson
A Small Press Distribution Best Seller
Fiction | Poetry | Drama
100 pages. Paperback. 2011
Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate
by Johannes Göransson
A Small Press Distribution Best Seller
Fiction | Poetry | Drama
100 pages. Paperback. 2011
I don’t know where else you could contract the plague in these words but by ten TVs at once. On the TVs play: Salo, the weather channel, 2x Fassbinder (any), Family Double Dare, ads for ground beef, blurry surgical recordings, porno, porno, Anger (all). An 11th TV right behind you will show you yourself reading to the backside of your head. You’ll need a machine gun and a body double. You will not feel your disease: as here these words bring such high pleasure: this malaria is fun. It’s also fidgety, petrifying, elegantly rash, giddy, stunned. Burroughs and Genet and ‘Pac are dead. Long live Goransson. (Blake Butler) Body parts, body styles. Genitalia as fashion, as construct, as exploit. Göransson has managed to produce a discomfiting, filthy, hilarious, and ecstatic piece of literature that is cocked and ready. (Lorian Long, Bookslut) Voluptuous, turbulent, and focused, inventive and strictly faithful to the performative instability of our queer moment, Johannes Goransson’s new book brings page and stage together in order to put genre (and gender) to a series of on-going tests. Here body and body of work (inextricable) are in a critical condition: subject to an invasive and relentless interpretation. (Laura Mullen) Goransson pays the ultimate penance and shoulders the heaviest burden: to reflect a culture accurately, no matter how disfigured. His art drinks deep of the disease it most fears so that we can learn more from his symptoms. So for all its ugliness—all its child predators and body dysmorphia, its castrations, its Ronald Reagans, its hate crimes and artists and anorexia, everything—Entrance is the dubious gift of the diagnosis we’ve been too afraid to confront on our own. It’s embarrassing, it’s frightening, but it’s also potentially the long-neglected first step in addressing a major disease. (Nick Demske) Page after page begins to infect the reader, begins to parasite the reader as host, parasite the host’s inner child . . . before immolating the host, the reader. (Joseph Michael Owens, PANK Magazine)
I don’t know where else you could contract the plague in these words but by ten TVs at once. On the TVs play: Salo, the weather channel, 2x Fassbinder (any), Family Double Dare, ads for ground beef, blurry surgical recordings, porno, porno, Anger (all). An 11th TV right behind you will show you yourself reading to the backside of your head. You’ll need a machine gun and a body double. You will not feel your disease: as here these words bring such high pleasure: this malaria is fun. It’s also fidgety, petrifying, elegantly rash, giddy, stunned. Burroughs and Genet and ‘Pac are dead. Long live Goransson. (Blake Butler) Body parts, body styles. Genitalia as fashion, as construct, as exploit. Göransson has managed to produce a discomfiting, filthy, hilarious, and ecstatic piece of literature that is cocked and ready. (Lorian Long, Bookslut) Voluptuous, turbulent, and focused, inventive and strictly faithful to the performative instability of our queer moment, Johannes Goransson’s new book brings page and stage together in order to put genre (and gender) to a series of on-going tests. Here body and body of work (inextricable) are in a critical condition: subject to an invasive and relentless interpretation. (Laura Mullen) Goransson pays the ultimate penance and shoulders the heaviest burden: to reflect a culture accurately, no matter how disfigured. His art drinks deep of the disease it most fears so that we can learn more from his symptoms. So for all its ugliness—all its child predators and body dysmorphia, its castrations, its Ronald Reagans, its hate crimes and artists and anorexia, everything—Entrance is the dubious gift of the diagnosis we’ve been too afraid to confront on our own. It’s embarrassing, it’s frightening, but it’s also potentially the long-neglected first step in addressing a major disease. (Nick Demske) Page after page begins to infect the reader, begins to parasite the reader as host, parasite the host’s inner child . . . before immolating the host, the reader. (Joseph Michael Owens, PANK Magazine)
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.