The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits
Tarpaulin Sky Press
ISBN: 9780982541616
Fiction/Poetry | 5"x7", 74 pp, pbk |May 2010
Cover art by Daniel Rhodes
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The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits is the prose elegy of a boy who wants to be a bug in order to save by symbiosis the dead girl he loves. Can Harlan, in “the basement forever inside him,” conjure Toland back from “the scars of Monday”? Enacted in prose poems and cross-referenced datebooks, the inseparable lovers, Harlan and Toland, eternally rehearse for a real life together, repeating in that instant between being and nonbeing, the loss into which their love escaped.
A strange romance of “the secret motions of things” (Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis, 1627), Kim Gek Lin Short’s The Bugging Watch and Other Exhibits is an exciting, mysterious, sometimes macabre new narrative. Her zany futuristic gothic opera of prose poems is threaded with magic, potions, passion, a “concert of hair,” a “hazmat of holes.” With its incantations of quantum teleology, its footnotes & sources, it is a magnificent work. Irresistible!
—Norma Cole
This small unsettling book first proposes a stiflingly sweet symbiosis between two shut-in innamorati, and then lets its queer world subdivide in a theater of exfoliating roles. Most shocking in this miniature is the Rosebud at its center, a muse who breaks with her mate only to reinvent him out of bugs, ink and sugarwater. Like a Victorian photo collage mounting, say, the head of Prince Albert on a croquet mallet or umbrella handle, this seemingly innocuous work both conceals and reveals its morbidity, its twisted thirsts.About the Author
—Joyelle McSweeney
Kim Gek Lin Short is the author of The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2010) and China Cowboy (forthcoming from Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2011, as well as two chapbooks, The Residents (dancing girl press) and Run (Rope-a-Dope). She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and daughter.
Work from The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits was first published in Caketrain Journal, Drunken Boat, 42 Opus, Mad Poet’s Review, No Tell Motel, Shattered Wig Review, SoMa Literary Review, Tarpaulin Sky and Wicked Alice. “The Exhibits” was published as a chapbook entitled The Residents (dancing girl press). Parts of “The Bugging Watch” section were published in the anthology narrative (dis)continuities: prose experiments by younger american writers (Recycled Karma Press).
