And another award on top of that one!
Although it's not really Johannes winning the award so much, or even his book, entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate. But, rather, winning the awards are the blurbs by Blake Butler and Aaron Kunin:
BLURB OF THE YEAR
“It would take a miracle to perform this pageant. For a start, you would have to reanimate Charlotte Brontë, Adolf Loos, and Ronald Reagan, and you would need an ungodly amount of wax. Most of the action is obscene, and therefore takes place offstage. The actors enter and report on scenes of spectacular violence that go on all the time every day. The audience is part of the spectacle too. We are all transformed into images somewhere in this script. At one point, all of Hollywood appears onstage in the form of dead horses, perhaps because Hollywood film continues to rely on narrative conventions that it exhausted long ago. The entire world also appears, played by a boy who, in a series of rapid costume changes, puts on increasingly pretty dresses.” — Aaron Kunin on Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate by Johannes Göransson (Tarpaulin Sky)
MOST POP CULTURE REFERENCES
“I don’t know where else you could contract the plague in these words but by ten TVs at once. On the TVs play: Salo, the weather channel, 2x Fassbinder (any), Family Double Dare, ads for ground beef, blurry surgical recordings, porno, porno, Anger (all). . . . Burroughs and Genet and ‘Pac are dead. Long live Göransson.” — Blake Butler on Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate by Johannes Göransson (Tarpaulin Sky)
Also included:
BEST STRING OF IDIOMS
“Spick and span, cut and dry, shake and bake, and now Elaine Equi introduces Click and Clone. These poetically altered texts punch holes into the multiverses of pop and splendor, short and longing, prose and dreams. Equi says that art can no longer imitate life, it just needs to keep up. As they might say at the racetrack, she leads by a verse.” — Charles Bernstein on Click and Clone by Elaine Equi (Coffee House Press)
GREATEST RANGE OF EMOTION
“Filip Marinovich’s second book spans the Otts, the outs, and many outposts. Travel with Filip and meet the phantoms of airplane chewing gum and beat on a drum with a Molotov cocktail. ‘What’s happening? What is happening to me?’ The poems of Filip Marinovich, that’s what! This book makes me cry, then laugh, it’s awful, it’s fantastic! Joy is in the movement he says and there is an inexplicable physicality between each word! Have you been here? Ever visit such a place? In one sitting you will read it and want every book to possess such tangential magic! I’m stupid with love for the genius of Filip Marinovich!” — CA Conrad on And If You Don’t Go Crazy I’ll Meet You Here Tomorrow by Filip Marinovich (Ugly Duckling Presse)
BEST REFERENCE TO KAFKA AND LOU REED
“Kafka’s bureaucratic ephemera and Smithson’s grand earthworks morph in Susan Briante’s hands into these dance-like poems, complex and elegant architectures of gesture, a New Babylon of corridors between Texan birches and the strains of Lou Reed’s guitar. Briante is a detritus artist, a gleaner working in the banal of the contemporary world, molding the pieces she finds into vivid mosaics. In Utopia Minus Briante claims her lineage, mapped through dried out gutters in which real human bodies, somewhat uncomfortable but very much alive, float upon a raft made of reassembled bits of downcycled American cities, east mating with west, big colliding with small.” — Rachel Levitsky on Utopia Minus by Susan Briante (Ahsahta Press)
And more! Seriously hilarious. Check out the Blurby Awards!
