Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Mark Lamoureux’s SPECTRE is Now Available @ SPD!


Dear All,

Please check this out: new from Black Radish Books (publisher of my book Occultations and Marthe Reed's Gaze) comes Spectre, the latest and perhaps most subtle, spectacular, form of poetic social insurrection veiled as (or rubbing up against in the darkest real places) hauntology. Mark Lamoureux's book defies nomination, is fun, funny, probing, beautiful, and beautifully frightening. Editor of the vital Cy Gist Press,  Mark simply knows what he's doing. Which is knowing that he doesn't know, and neither do you. Surprise yourself and order this book. If you need a little push, below is what people are saying about it. 

Purchase here: http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9780982573112/spectre.aspx


Populated with broke down carnival contraptions, abandoned amusement park rides, darkly oozing shell casings, and haunted noggins, the strangeland of Mark Lamoureux’s Spectre is glazed with icy artifice in the form of twisted architectures, mutant effigies, and the creep of strange glaciers inside warped snow dome brains. The dioramas inside these domes are artificial universes composed of circuitries of nerve endings encased in ice, glinting with glassy sugar, crackling with sporadic surges of electricity and tiny shocks—a little piggy dressed as a ghoul, a sinister cheerleader with red boots, a foam rubber skeleton that is not so different from you. This collection offers up a chilling calendar of sorts, each box a curio slot of new days “like the old days, only creepier, less goddamn real.”—Juliet Cook, author of Fondant Pig Angst

Mark Lamoureux’s disturbing and often distinctly American landscapes explore the interface between fantasy and fatalism, magic and machine. In the tradition of Duncan and Spicer, he is a metaphysical poet for our times, when even “the cheerleader’s dreams are sinister” and “what was once all Wagner is now/ all Duran Duran.” What a pleasure to sift through baroque layers of ornament and debris with a poet of such keen and precise intelligence—one who in dark times “carries a dark lamp.”—Elaine Equi

The poems of Spectre are soulful immediacies emitted in a syntactic stream of synaesthetic particulars. The largess of dreams shattered and shattered again into pressurized miniatures of detail where desiccation and nostalgia meet. Pressures and stresses are psychic. Lamoureux’s lyric is crowded with the delicate filaments of ghosts, monsters, spirits, mythology, stuff of existence, banal trinkets, detritus and the numina inhabiting the objectified world of these visionary subjects. Psychic recognition and desire pull these details into focus, suture the traces, suspend animation—there is a tug between the ethereal and the terrestrial. This is a revenant’s teleology, a doctrine that tells us phenomenon are guided not only by mechanical forces but that they also move toward certain motifs of self realization—there are vibes. Each utterance of Lamoureux's is a divining voice. Prophecies are rendered in silken and metallic sheens. Each calibration is a tension aligning beauty and the psyche.—Brenda Iijima


No comments:

Post a Comment