Haute Surveillance
by Johannes Göransson

Fiction | Poetry | Other
200 pages. Paperback. 2013

Cover art: Fi Jae Lee: “The Poet Yi Sang’s Wedding and Funeral”
2011. Fish Skin, Lace, Wire.

… Insects are pumping their lancets in and out of my sore. It’s an almost purple sore. It’s a translation. Pornography. A child’s drawing. My preferred method of making art involves a torso. I write this for the mute actress and the dead girls and the Virgin Father who speaks in this mausoleum and Mother Machine Gun who carries my body through the tumultuous crowds. Sticky and stricken-out, I write this for people on posters. I write this for the breathers and bleeders. I write this with a geometry suggesting awkwardness. I write this as a punishment. I write this for those infested and luxurious and teeming. I write this for the people who are at war. I vandalize my do-wop body due to my modest self-control. I call my line of work haute surveillance.

Haute Surveillance
by Johannes Göransson

Fiction | Poetry | Other
200 pages. Paperback. 2013

Cover art: Fi Jae Lee: “The Poet Yi Sang’s Wedding and Funeral”
2011. Fish Skin, Lace, Wire.

… Insects are pumping their lancets in and out of my sore. It’s an almost purple sore. It’s a translation. Pornography. A child’s drawing. My preferred method of making art involves a torso. I write this for the mute actress and the dead girls and the Virgin Father who speaks in this mausoleum and Mother Machine Gun who carries my body through the tumultuous crowds. Sticky and stricken-out, I write this for people on posters. I write this for the breathers and bleeders. I write this with a geometry suggesting awkwardness. I write this as a punishment. I write this for those infested and luxurious and teeming. I write this for the people who are at war. I vandalize my do-wop body due to my modest self-control. I call my line of work haute surveillance.

Beautifully startling and fucked and funny and tender and sad and putrid and glitter-covered all at once. (Blake Butler, VICESo filled with invention and wit and ferocity that I was compelled to read it, at times against my will, mesmerized, enthralled. (Carole Maso) A book that is unclassifiable — part epic poem, part science fiction, part pornographic film, and all literature. John Yau, HyperallergicIt’s spectacular, it’s pyrotechnics, it’s naked bodies and sex and orgies…. And there is trauma. It’s an emergency, a state of emergency. “The trauma saturates the mansion, it’s a trauma-rama.” (Laura Carter, Fanzine)

Beautifully startling and fucked and funny and tender and sad and putrid and glitter-covered all at once. (Blake Butler, VICESo filled with invention and wit and ferocity that I was compelled to read it, at times against my will, mesmerized, enthralled. (Carole Maso) A book that is unclassifiable — part epic poem, part science fiction, part pornographic film, and all literature. John Yau, HyperallergicIt’s spectacular, it’s pyrotechnics, it’s naked bodies and sex and orgies…. And there is trauma. It’s an emergency, a state of emergency. “The trauma saturates the mansion, it’s a trauma-rama.” (Laura Carter, Fanzine)

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 HackersDark 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 HackersDark 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.