REVIEWS

REVIEWS

Summer reviewed by Jared Joseph in Asymptote

February 2nd, 2023|

"As a poetic embodiment of an injunction to embrace a more inclusive, more inflationary art, Summer is a book whose multilingual form and (non)translative dynamic haunt “the Western preferment of the ‘spirit’ over the ‘body,’” and thereby the nationalistic and xenophobic ideologies undergirding traditional Western poetry."

Summer reviewed in fck yr bookclub

February 2nd, 2023|

"Written into and through the death of his infant daughter from a rare lung condition, Göransson’s elegy/revenge fantasy (to paraphrase his description of the book) captivated me like few collections I’ve read in the past year."

John Yau, Hyperallergic review of Poetry Against All

February 8th, 2021|

"...the most recent genre-bending book from a writer who detonates the lanes that in which mainstream writing is content to stay, from the predictable frisson caused by coolly deadpan conceptual poetry to the packaged emotional uplift of what Ron Silliman called the 'School of Quietude.'.. This book of 45 short prose entries may not be poetry in either the conventional or avant-garde sense, but it is poetry nevertheless."

Poetry Against All reviewed by Ryan Bollenbach at Big Other

February 8th, 2021|

"I was drawn by the breadth of Goransson’s discussions of film, music, and writing, and the aesthetics of pornography, debasement, kitsch, moralism, and nostalgia. He emphasizes an organic and visceral reading and writing practice in line with Steven Shaviro’s film criticism in The Cinematic Body—a text Göransson mentions multiple times in Poetry Against All—of embracing a masochistic relationship to art by allowing oneself to be ravished by it."

Sugar Book examined at Atticus Review

August 27th, 2015|

Laura Carter: "It’s anything but comfortable for us as readers. This sugary land is where life is frail, anorexic, and hardly moving, where the buzzing of flames and water (and perhaps a bit of ?) is ever present. A true horror play, a comedy of failures that can’t seem to find a livable world, which may be closer than the characters imagine."

Fanzine review of The Sugar Book

May 17th, 2015|

"If it’s automatic writing, it’s machinic (firing on all eight cylinders). A circular vernacular. Freud’s death drive tied through repetition compulsion plus mnemonics to standard schoolmarm SVO. Haunt Musique. Sends its message like a mail train. Visceral Surrealism. [Johannes Goransson's] end game is an exit wound."

Publishers Weekly reviews The Sugar Book

April 21st, 2015|

"Doubling down on his trademark misanthropic imagery amid a pageantry of the unpleasant, Johannes Göransson strolls through a violent Los Angeles in this hybrid of prose and verse…. Prostitution, pubic hair, Orpheus, law, pigs, disease, Francesca Woodman ... and the speaker’s hunger for cocaine and copulation..... Fans of Göransson’s distorted poetics will find this a productive addition to his body of work."

Entropy Mag review of The Sugar Book

April 16th, 2015|

"In Johannes Göransson’s poetry, there is no self-congratulation…. Göransson is a controversial poet.... Göransson is certainly of the Left, but his work is as savagely anti-idealist as Burroughs or Guyotat or Ballard. Like those writers, he has no interest in assuring the reader that she or he lives, along with the poet, on the right side of history."

The Sugar Book at American Microreviews

April 15th, 2015|

“Goransson uses language smeared with bodily fluid and sex, language spackled with violence and death (in addition to literal bodies in states of otherness, objectification, violation, and evisceration), in mini-Ars Poeticas and commentary on the state of art and the art scene…. The Sugar Book is vile and violent, but also asphyxiatingly sweet, choking while gorging on its aloof, artful persona. It unsettles. It takes the reader far beyond their comfort zone, as poetry should. Just like Los Angeles herself, the poems inhabit that glittering/grotesque duality of Kardashian Family and Manson Family.”

The Sugar Book reviewed at Cleaver Magazine

March 6th, 2015|

"Antonin Artaud gave us the Theater of Cruelty. He 'for whom delirium was/the only solution/to the strangulation/that life had prepared for him.” Now Johannes Goransson, in the ironically named The Sugar Book, gives us a poetry of cruelty. It is the necessary car wreck that brings the Jaws of Life. The book is a whisky genre-bender in a haunted Los Angeles.…. [The Sugar Book is] a tome in which vomit, semen (lots and lots and lots), and mercury poisoning drip from page after page. I’m not sure that even Rimbaud would title a poem 'My Sperm Gets in the Flowers.'"

Bombay Gin micro-review of Haute Surveillance

December 24th, 2014|

"A textual representation of the horrific and luminous spectacle of a post-modern condition defined by unavoidable participation in (and often a voluntary surrender to) a global war economy. The multi-genre work (a novel in dialogue with prose poetry and punctuated by epistolary and dramatic interludes) embodies a term coined in its own narrative, “atrocity kitsch,” inhabiting bathtubs, war prisons, and a Shining Mansion on the Hill...."

Haute Surveillance reviewed at glassworks

January 22nd, 2014|

[Göransson] places readers in his piecework of violence, sex, art and emotion, in short snapshots of unexplained events, and leaves them scrambling to find their way out. Readers get one companion, one true character: an unreliable, determined, and probably insane narrator, and the reader slowly realizes this world is the narrator’s own....

Entrance to a Colonial Pageant, reviewed at MAKE Magazine

November 22nd, 2013|

"[P]ursues the genre to terra incognita extremes.... [I]n some ways more a prose poem, bludgeoned and stuffed into dramaturgical form.... Its kaleidoscopic impossibility presses down upon the reader, forcing the question: Who writes the stage directions of life, the role each person plays in society?... Like a mad scientist throwing together unexpected chemicals, Goransson delights in coupling divergent concepts, seeing which combinations smoke, sizzle, or explode...."

Kind words…

July 26th, 2013|

...from Patrick Trotti at JMWW, regarding Tarpaulin Sky Press's three 2013 prose titles: my own Haute Surveillance, Claire Donato's Burial, and Joyelle McSweeney's Salamandrine: 8 Gothics; all of which, writes Trotti, "continue the press’ solid run of publishing innovative [...]

John Yau reviews Haute Surveillance at Hyperallergic

May 13th, 2013|

"Göransson’s fast-paced, present-tense writing critiques itself while moving forward, collapsing together all of discourses and vocabularies associated with the nightly news, feminism, sexual identity, Hollywood movies, science fiction, performance art, pornography, and poetry invested in the stable lyric “I.” Bots from academia mix with bits of the street.... Goransson turns it into a book that is unclassifiable — part epic poem, part science fiction, part pornographic film, and all literature."

Blake Butler at VICE reviews, excerpts Haute Surveillance

May 8th, 2013|

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."

Haute Surveillance and Uche Nduka’s Ijele reviewed by Stacy Hardy

April 12th, 2013|

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.'"

Ken Chen reviews, excerpts Haute Surveillance at Culturestrike

March 31st, 2013|

Göransson's book-length poem, writes Chen, "combines all these meanings of pure, fake, authentic, corrupt, synthetic. The poem is an evil Leaves of Grass — not a welcoming cosmic paean to all American citizens, but a nihilistic porno where the pure and the fake copulate with a sordid glory. By real, Göransson means: children burning in bombed buildings, the bodies of foreigners, sperm and blood, traumatized soldiers strangling their wives. By fake, he means: film sets, stunt doubles, poetry. You can see this combo in how he depicts America: America is not an emancipatory pluralistic haven, but an atavistic theater of war, brutally real and, as Baudrillard has written, as simulated as a video game."

Jamie Grefe on Haute Surveillance

March 20th, 2013|

Writes Grefe: "I was a mute foreigner, unpredictable as outsider. One who knows how to screw a fork. There are areas in Tokyo, in Seoul, in Beijing where foreigners are allowed to be foreign, allowed to tongue foreign, act foreign: needles, erotics, vomit. These are the areas where we grind chains in underground cabarets, McDonalds drunk with military officers, a man who said, 'as an American, it is my duty to protect you.'"

Bomb Blog Review Aase Berg

July 27th, 2012|

Over at Bomb's blog, Julia Guez writes a thoughtful review of Aase Berg's Forsla fett (Transfer Fat in my translation): Archaisms, imports, and neologisms also help renovate and overhaul the language (with significant implications for [...]

Review of Deformation Zone at Los Angeles Review

July 20th, 2012|

Michael Shea has written a very generous review of Deformation Zone, Joyelle's and my pamphlet of translation theorizings. Excerpt: Deformation Zone, a pair of essays from Johannes Göransson and Joyelle McSweeney on the subversive nature [...]

Bookslut reviews entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate

January 1st, 2012|

At Bookslut, Lorian Long reviews 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."

Entrance to a colonial pageant reviewed at Red Fez

September 30th, 2011|

entrance to a colonial pageant is reviewed by Robert Kloss at Red Fez: "One of those rare literary achievements, a work so new and brilliant and strange that a reviewer initially fumbles for any possible comparisons and antecedents to make sense of the text in-question.... With no true literary antecedent as preparation, the accumulating horror of Göransson’s prose onslaughts overwhelm with their ruthless beauty, to remarkable and lasting effect."

PANK Magazine reviews entrance to a colonial pageant

July 6th, 2011|

At PANK Magazine, Joseph Michael Owens reviews entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2011): "[entrance] "demands its reader to engage it on a close sentence-to-sentence level and rewards the reader with some truly spectacular prose. Prose that, 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."

HTML Giant reviews entrance to a colonial pageant

March 3rd, 2011|

At HTML Giant, Ryan Downey reviews entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2011): "A hybrid form somewhere between or among the categories of poetry, prose, essay, theatre production, and instruction manual.... A relationship to an Artaudian Theatre of Cruelty.... Masks and intricate costumes aplenty.... Dresses made from looted items, prison-style clothes, black and polished bodies, cowboy costumes, skins charred from suicide bombings, heaps of dead horses, birds bursting from bodies, wounds, basketball jerseys on androgynous children, kissing faces and murder victims, exoskeletons, audience members in whiteface.... A pile up of sequined things and fleshy things. . . . The audience is often implicated. After all, torture and interrogation is not borne out of individual will and action alone. . . . All aboard."

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