Thanks to reviewer Laura Carter, who writes
This book is mammoth, and by that I mean it sings of the horrors of mediated existence, an existence of entrapment and pain. Johannes Göransson’s latest media exercise includes text from sources as diverse as Wikipedia and books by Daniel Defoe and Emily Dickinson. The narrator of this haunted book of hybrid text—some poems, some prose–spills his guts on topics as various as abortion, a son who is locked up, and a daughter with a moth-eye named Arson. The best part about this idiosyncratic book is how it serves as a mirror of the underground: one imagines a surgical scalpel taking apart the ordinary pleasures of the daily until their true Real is exposed….
Its lack of a distinct plot is what makes it the striking mirror it is, of sugar and spice and (well, if I have to come right out and say it) the mediated world that people, especially poets, sometimes find themselves in. This book rings true, much as other books of his do, and we get the sense that the book is trying to wake us up to something, much as someone like Andy Warhol or even a more conceptually-minded poet would.
One gets the sense that Göransson has spent his time learning how to critique that which he mirrors, and this picture of a sugar land isn’t meant to be comforting, and in fact, 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.
Read the rest at Atticus Review. Read more about The Sugar Book
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