haute-cover-fcsAt Vice, Blake Butler writes an excellent review of Haute Surveillance (Tarpaulin Sky Press, May 2013), and also includes a generous excerpt.

Here’s the intro to Blake’s review:

There’s an ecstatic kind of media collision at work in the body of language produced by Swedish-born Johannes Göransson. Over the course of six books of his own, as well as translations of major Swedish authors like Aase Berg and Henry Parland, he has assembled an incredibly volatile and feverish vision, somewhere between Artaud and Lars Von Trier, though one more interested in the awkwardness and orchestration of the profane than simply milking it. His latest work, Haute Surveillance, may also be his most provocative. Here Johannes has assembled 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.

Read the rest at Vice.