Johannes Göransson's Haute Surveillance (Tarpaulin Sky Press 2013): "A feverish and explicit set of images and ideas revolving around power, fetish, porn, media, violence, translation, punishment, performance, and aesthetics. Taking its title from a Jean Genet play of the same name, it’s kind of like a novelization of a movie about the production of a play based on Abu Ghraib, though with way more starlets and cocaine and semen.... [B]eautifully startling and fucked and funny and tender and sad and putrid and glitter-covered all at once."

Writes Hardy: "The narrative of [Göransson's Haute Surveillance] is itinerant, slippery. It unwinds, confused by voices, rhythms, and accents, 'interlingual puns', 'auto-translations' and 'automutilations' that befuddle the desire for a secure semantics. It is at once a prose poem, a 'novel dedicated to the homos and the awkward perfumists', a biography of its author, an 'autobiography of a foreigner', 'a fashion show dedicated to a riot', a film script and a theoretical text.... 'This is the first lesson in haute surveillance: Always write like you’re a teenage virgin. Always reach for the gun.'"

"Imagine that you are on a secret journey through the life of Jean Genet, through the shifting framework of a character made by Johannes Göransson," writes Carter, who imagines no small number of scenarios for readers of Haute Surveillance (TSky Press, 2013), in a review that's worth reading as a thing unto itself. "You are a teenage virgin," Carter continues, a few sentences later, "the marriage of pornography and Art, which will, in the long run (as many Woody Allen movies suggest) turn you into a Dictator."

At Bookslut, Lorian Long reviews Johannes Goransson's *entrance to a colonial pageant*: "Despite the tiny size of Colonial Pageant, it contains a gore so massive you will either shower or move the book to the other side of the bedroom upon opening its cover....Body parts, body styles. Genitalia as fashion, as construct, as exploit. Göransson takes Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity and blasts it with skin-made dynamite. He creates such a mess of appendages, desires, and impulses that the taglines of Queer Theory or Gender Studies seem antiquated compared to the blurring of binaries to be found in this work. It is a new thing. Göransson has managed to produce a discomfiting, filthy, hilarious, and ecstatic piece of literature that is cocked and ready."

Thanks to Tim Yelvington, whose insights abound. Here’s an excerpt: [...]

At 3:AM Magazine, SJ Fowler conducts a brief but excellent interview with Johannes Göransson, with an emphasis on translation. "When you bring translations into the discussion," says Goransson, "people tend to get suspicious: How do we know that the poem is good in the original? That it’s a “faithful” translation? That we’re not being fooled? How can we master all this excess? You can’t of course. And that’s the beauty of it."