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 in which we all begin to intricate, in American Poetry Review.

Excerpt:

… Where is the hybrid poetic lietreature that does this, that reaches an “ugly ecstastic” in a “constant state of tension” that “reconstitutes the public discourse”?… And this thrillingly, is what can be found in radical poet-scholar-publisher-translator Joyelle McSweeney’s latest book, Percussion Grenade, and in th elatest book by her life partner and fellow radical poet-scholar-publisher-translator Johannes Göransson, Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate… As the titles suggest, both of these books are bombs: explosive, violent, owing much to Surrealism (especially the Artaud kind) and Dadaism but propelling these movements forward, via catapult, into a very 21st century Theater of the Absurd…

She wishes we did more with pictures and such, but I am more interested in the “as if” quality of texts: texts that pretend to be things they are not (poems that pretend to be plays, plays that pretend to be poems, travesties that pretend to be nativity scenes, memoirs read as science fiction, words that pretend to be image, images that pretend to be hieroglyphs etc)… but that’s another post… Anyway, much love to Arielle.