The Sugar Book at American Microreviews
“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
"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
"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...."
Excerpts from The Sugar Book at The Ampersand Review
Selections include "I suffer from vertigo in the sepulchral chambers of the law," "Safe in my chambers of alabaster," "Now I have you in the underworld," and "My Orpheus mask is shitty when I fuck Francesca Woodman."
Haute Surveillance reviewed at glassworks
[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
"[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…
...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 [...]
Excerpts from The Sugar Book at Similar Peaks
Similar Peaks features a healthy swath of text from The Sugar Book, which Tarpaulin Sky Press will publish in early 2015.
John Yau reviews Haute Surveillance at Hyperallergic
"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
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
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.'"
Laura Carter reviews Haute Surveillance at Fanzine
At Fanzine, Laura Carter reviews Haute Surveillance. "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. "You are a [...]