Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate

entrance-cover-400
Fiction / Poetry / Drama
5.5″ x 7″, 100 pp., pbk.
Tarpaulin Sky Press
2011

“Contains a gore so massive you will either shower or move the book to the other side of the bedroom upon opening its cover…. It is a new thing. Göransson has managed to produce a discomfiting, filthy, hilarious, and ecstatic piece of literature that is cocked and ready” (Lorian Long, Bookslut); “Goransson pays the ultimate penance and shoulders the heaviest burden: to reflect a culture accurately, no matter how disfigured. His art drinks deep of the disease it most fears so that we can learn more from his symptoms. He’s the Poet Laureate of the Coal Mine, our savior canary, dying and producing perpetually death-obsessed art that we might all be spared. So for all its ugliness—all its child predators and body dysmorphia, its castrations, its Ronald Reagans, its hate crimes and artists and anorexia, everything—Entrance is the dubious gift of the diagnosis we’ve been too afraid to confront on our own. It’s embarrassing, it’s frightening, but it’s also potentially the long-neglected first step in addressing a major disease”(Nick Demske).

REVIEWS OF ENTRANCE TO A COLONIAL PAGEANT

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...."

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."

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."

PANK Magazine reviews entrance to a colonial pageant

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

"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

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."

All content copyright 2001-2021 by Johannes Göransson unless otherwise indicated. Website by The Internet Joy Agency.
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