Ken Chen reviews, excerpts Haute Surveillance at Culturestrike
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
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.'"
"A cursory tracing of infection patterns": Jeremy Behreandt on Aase Berg's Dark Matter and "American kitschy-grotesque aesthetic"
Jeremy Behreandt has an excellent review of Dark Matter by Aase Berg up on Heavy Feather Review.In it he makes some really interesting comments about the matter-mind conflict in the poem and how this might [...]
"These books are bombs": Greenberg writes about Pageant, Percussion Grenade in APR
I forgot to mention that Arielle Greenberg has written a great piece about some "hybrid" books (not, however, of the "American Hybrid" kind), including Joyelle's Percussion Grenade and my own Entrance to a colonial pageant [...]
Interview at The Conversant
Here's an excerpt: H.L. Hix: Would it be in the spirit of your concluding observation in the “Translator’s Note” (that Berg “shows how every language may be foreign, even to its native speakers” [ix]) to [...]
Bomb Blog Review Aase Berg
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
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 [...]
Myles on Peter Richards, Massman on Dear Ra
Some new reviews. Here's an excerpt of Eileen Myles' piece on Peter Richards' Helsinki: Peter’s poem is a note from long ago which is now. Already happened fast. I mean he probably constructed these poems [...]
Bookslut reviews entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate
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
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."
LitPub review of Entrance to a colonial pageant…
Tim Yelvington has written a really great review of my book Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate. Here’s an excerpt: In her book Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality [...]
Interview at 3:AM Magazine
"American poetry has become very anarchic. Critics and academics always complain: there is too much of it! How do we know what’s good? They invent hierarchies of “innovative” poetry so they don’t have to dive into the excess, but in so doing they’re not only compromising their academic credibility (how can you be an “expert” on American poetry and have never read any of these wild, small Internet journals or participated in any of its sadistic blog discussions?) but they’re also losing out on a poetry scene that is constantly mutating and getting infected and multiplying and changing."