Salamandrine: 8 Gothics
by Joyelle McSweeney
Prose | Parenting | Occult
188 pages. Paperback. 2013
Masquerading as a collection of short fictions, Salamandrine is a channeled text, moonchild, unholy offspring of poetry and Loser Occult. Refracting the dread and isolation of contemporary life through a series of formal/generic lenses, producing a distorted, attenuated, spasmatic experience of time, as accompanies motherhood, Salamandrine renders impossible any thinking in terms of conventional temporalities or even causalities, let alone their narrative effects. Salamandrine is the high magick of art so low it crawls. Like a toddler at a poetry reading. With a taste for achilles heels. Hell-bent on bringing literature itself to its knees.
Salamandrine: 8 Gothics
by Joyelle McSweeney
Prose | Parenting | Occult
188 pages. Paperback. 2013
Masquerading as a collection of short fictions, Salamandrine is a channeled text, moonchild, unholy offspring of poetry and Loser Occult. Refracting the dread and isolation of contemporary life through a series of formal/generic lenses, producing a distorted, attenuated, spasmatic experience of time, as accompanies motherhood, Salamandrine renders impossible any thinking in terms of conventional temporalities or even causalities, let alone their narrative effects. Salamandrine is the high magick of art so low it crawls. Like a toddler at a poetry reading. With a taste for achilles heels. Hell-bent on bringing literature itself to its knees.
The stream of consciousness of an unhinged mother…. McSweeney’s breakneck prose harnesses the throbbing pulse of language itself. (Publishers Weekly) Sexy teleological apocrypha of motherhood literature, a siren song for those mothers “with no soul to photograph.” (Carmen Giménez Smith, The Brooklyn Rail) McSweeney writes like a synesthete sculpting sound, her sentences cross-wiring and corrupting our senses. It’s as if McSweeney wrote these sinful and sinewy stories with the knife of mad scientist, slicing and resuturing syntax, as prose unexpectedly breaking into verse. (Tasha Matsumoto, Quarterly West)
The stream of consciousness of an unhinged mother…. McSweeney’s breakneck prose harnesses the throbbing pulse of language itself. (Publishers Weekly) Sexy teleological apocrypha of motherhood literature, a siren song for those mothers “with no soul to photograph.” (Carmen Giménez Smith, The Brooklyn Rail) McSweeney writes like a synesthete sculpting sound, her sentences cross-wiring and corrupting our senses. It’s as if McSweeney wrote these sinful and sinewy stories with the knife of mad scientist, slicing and resuturing syntax, as prose unexpectedly breaking into verse. (Tasha Matsumoto, Quarterly West)
About the Author
Joyelle McSweeney is a poet, prose writer, playwright, critic and publisher. With Tarpaulin Sky Press she has published a baroque noir entitled Nylund, the Sarcographer (2007) as well as a collection of prose, Salamandrine: 8 Gothics (2013). McSweeney’s forthcoming poetry volume, Toxicon, will be published by Nightboat Books in 2019. McSweeney’s other recent books include The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults, a collection of poetics essays proposing a decadent ecopetics for our age of decay (University of Michigan Poets on Poetry Series, 2015); Percussion Grenade, a volume of poems including the infernal verse play, “Contagious Knives” (2012); and the ecopoetic farce Dead Youth, or, the Leaks (Litmus Press, 2014), a denatured version of The Tempest which won of the inaugural Leslie Scalapino Prize for Innovative Women Performance Artists. Her first poetry collection, The Red Bird, was chosen by Allen Grossman to inaugurate the Fence Modern Poets Series in 2002; her second, The Commandrine and Other Poems, featured her first verse play (Fence, 2004). Also published by Fence is her lyric sci-fi novel Flet (Fence, 2008). McSweeney is co-founder and co-publisher of Action Books, an international press for poetry and translation. The press focuses on modern and contemporary works from Latin America, Asia, the US and Europe.
About the Author
Joyelle McSweeney is a poet, prose writer, playwright, critic and publisher. With Tarpaulin Sky Press she has published a baroque noir entitled Nylund, the Sarcographer (2007) as well as a collection of prose, Salamandrine: 8 Gothics (2013). McSweeney’s forthcoming poetry volume, Toxicon, will be published by Nightboat Books in 2019. McSweeney’s other recent books include The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults, a collection of poetics essays proposing a decadent ecopetics for our age of decay (University of Michigan Poets on Poetry Series, 2015); Percussion Grenade, a volume of poems including the infernal verse play, “Contagious Knives” (2012); and the ecopoetic farce Dead Youth, or, the Leaks (Litmus Press, 2014), a denatured version of The Tempest which won of the inaugural Leslie Scalapino Prize for Innovative Women Performance Artists. Her first poetry collection, The Red Bird, was chosen by Allen Grossman to inaugurate the Fence Modern Poets Series in 2002; her second, The Commandrine and Other Poems, featured her first verse play (Fence, 2004). Also published by Fence is her lyric sci-fi novel Flet (Fence, 2008). McSweeney is co-founder and co-publisher of Action Books, an international press for poetry and translation. The press focuses on modern and contemporary works from Latin America, Asia, the US and Europe.