Margins
A New Quarantine Will Take My Place book cover
A New Quarantine Will Take My Place
2007
First Published
4.46
Average Rating
126
Number of Pages
Poetry. Welcome to Johannes "private genocide," ground zero for figurative language. Put on your best pig smile and meet the gratuitous martyrs, Kublai Khan, Colin Powell, the jackle-hearted masses, Herman Melville, Egyptian dogs, and the Coca-Cola Cowboys. They're all in the burning barn at the Big Dance where the Ballad of the Pig Circus plays like a torso full of "October of birds." Beauty becomes "a riddle doused in gasoline" in this Postmodern epic that mixes surrealist impulses with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E-esqe prosody. Notions of genre are demolished and language itself seems relegated to a wildly impossible epistemological space that is something akin to "whispering in hammers" or "speaking in silhouettes." If this sounds confusing, don't worry, the poet has sewn it all together with a "travesty of stitches," and he has "left his body inside the allegory." The poet satirizes, prods, pastiches, and "grotesquerizes" until every assumption we have, cultural or personal, crumbles in re-invented idiom.
Avg Rating
4.46
Number of Ratings
59
5 STARS
63%
4 STARS
25%
3 STARS
8%
2 STARS
2%
1 STARS
2%
goodreads

Author

Johannes Goransson
Johannes Goransson
Author · 7 books

Johannes Göransson is interested in approaches to writing that crosses boundaries – such as genre conventions and linguistic borders – and blurs the demarcations of the autonomous text. He is the author of three books of his own writings – A New Quarantine Will Take My Place, Dear Ra and Pilot (Johann the Carousel Horse) – with one more forthcoming in 2011, The Entrance Pageant. He wrote a performance piece The Widow Party, which was performed at Links Hall in Chicago in 2008. He is also the translator of the works of several modern and contemporary Swedish and Finland Swedish poets and writers – including Aase Berg, Henry Parland and Johan Jönson. He has written critically about contemporary American and Swedish poetry, translation theory, the historical avant-garde, Sylvia Plath, and Gurlesque poetry and other neo-gothic aesthetics. In addition, he has a special interest in film, particularly the 1960s underground cinema of Kenneth Anger and Jack Smith. Together with Joyelle McSweeney, Johannes publishes Action Books; and together with McSweeney and John Woods, he edits the online zine Action, Yes. ”For me poetry is inextricably bound up in issues of immigration, homelessness, translation.” Interview: http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/mainte...

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