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| Cover design by Andrew Shuta. |
Kim's is a "difficult" book, by any definition.
We like that.
China Cowboy is not a platform, a soundbite, a two-party system, monsters v. innocents....
Thus we are delighted to read Travis Macdonald's review on the Fact-Simile Editions blog, aptly titled " Confronting Kim Gek Lin Short's China Cowboy."
Writes Macdonald:
Just like the book’s protagonist, La La, who “...wears all her clothes. Her boots. All three skirts. All the shirts. The panties, many of them...” China Cowboy by Kim Gek Lin Short is an expertly woven story told in tangled layers.
It is the story of an abduction or escape, a brutal love affair or abusive imprisonment, rise to fame or road to perdition, art installation or songbook retrospective. It is each of these things in turn or neither depending on the narrator in charge at any given moment.
Told in turn from the perspectives of each of the book’s primary characters (La La and Ren), China Cowboy is a successfully executed experiment in prosody that simultaneously braids and frays narrative timelines and expectations, bringing the reader to the brink of every sensory extreme and back again. The result is a darkly surreal adventure in perception that leaves one’s nerves exposed and moral fortitude shaken....
We don't know how we missed this, but we are glad to have discovered Helen McClory's excellent review of Jenny Boully's not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them at PANK Magazine.
Writes McClory:
In this prose-poem hybrid, the texts of Peter Pan have been enmeshed, re-corded, and spun into a thickness of sensual detail and slippery cross-reference. Under Boully’s fingertips, Neverland has burst open like a sodden swollen root, spilling out cutlery, birds, bearskins, thimbles, peas, open windows, mermaid scales, pubic hair, damp pirate beards, and fairy dust, of course....
Read the entire review here.
Read more about, perhaps buy, Jenny Boully's not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them.
 Megan Burns's review of Claire Hero's Dollyland is filled with so many killer phrases and perceptions, the review would be worth reading even if Dollyland was just an idea rather than a physical book.
Here are just a few of our favorite sentences in Burns's review:
Claire Hero's newest collection Dollyland features 15 [prose] poems about that once dearly- beloved clone of clones, Dolly the Sheep, and if Dolly the Sheep opened a theme park, Hero could outfit the House of Horrors with verses such as these....
[Hero's] language rests hoofed and cloven as she takes us in hand to wander in the bones and muscles of that domesticated wilderness of the animal song....
...inhabiting the dark underbelly of a thing found first not in nature but in the lab.....
Science, religion, politics and belief came to the forefront in the unlikely form of a sheep, a wooly being through which we worked out our dark need to control and contain the shape of life and death....
Hero lets the wound stay open, she allows the reader to fall into the abyss, a bit terrible and also bitten down into the mouthfuls that she shoves in repeatedly. In this place, we are the beast, we are the faulty construction, we are the ones supplying the wool against the cold night and we are the ones choking on how much we swallow....
Click here to read the full review.
Click here to read more about, or purchase, Claire Hero's chapbook, Dollyland.
Not sure how we missed this, when it first went live in April, but Rebecca Hazelton published a great review of Jenny Boully's not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them.
Here's a snippet:
Peter and Wendy is [J.M.] Barrie’s novelization of a stage play, originally intended for adults but significantly altered for a child audience. The later Disney adaptation, Peter Pan, bears only a passing resemblance to the original story. Boully’s book retells the tale through the lens of memory, bringing the subtext of sexual and adulthood anxieties into the foreground. Tiger Lily, who competes for Peter’s attentions in the source text, is here even more overtly sexual, “her thong all encrusted with the little shells from the seashore…she doesn’t shave her pubes, and they’re all sticking out and out.” Wendy, who, as in the book, plays house with Peter in a kind of mock-marriage, wants a “marriage made more real” and is regularly associated with images of growing, pregnancy, and menstruation.
Also brought to the fore are the intentional and unintentional cruelties of Peter, about whom we are told: “this much is ever so real; this much isn't make-believe. Peter Pan can do a great deal in ten minutes. He can do a great deal to you. For example, he can put a little something inside of you, and you will carry that for the rest of your life..."
Read the rest of the Hazelton's review at Devil's Lake, published by the good folks at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
And follow this link to read more about--perhaps even to purchase!-- Jenny Boully's not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them.
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