Blog

ART, LITERATURE, TRANSLATION: DEFORMATION, VIOLENCE, ATROCITY KITSCH

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."

Interview at HTML Giant

June 3rd, 2011|

"I’m more interested in art as violence, art as a haunting, as a spirit photograph, as what Aase Berg calls a “deformation zone” or what Joyelle has called “necropastoral.” (Joyelle’s actually right now downstairs playing some gloomy Cure song from the 80s for our daughters.) Art that is both Art and a contagion in the world. By not fully accounting for these figures, what I want them to be is this unstable matter. I want it all to be kind of shitty, you know."

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."

Interview at Exchanges: Journal of Literary Translation

December 21st, 2009|

"It’s definitely about a bilingual experience I guess. A lot of is based on translation of things I feel nostalgic about, which is usually 80’s Swedish punk music. There’s lots of quotations, and the characters that appear again like a carousel. There’s also stuff that’s based on Swedish translations of English texts or a lot of Mayakovski translations, the Gunnar Harding translation of Mayakovski, that I leave as sort of the English translations of the Swedish translations."

Interview at HTML Giant

September 8th, 2009|

"Why did Joyelle and I start Action Books?… Ever since I went to graduate school I’ve known that nobody would publish the kind of writing I liked. Even Artaud… if Artaud wrote today City Lights wouldn’t publish it. If Celine wrote today New Directions wouldn’t publish it… Etc… Not much chance for me or my Shangri-las. No much chance for someone whose idea of heroism involved putting out cigarettes on his arms…"

Go to Top