The Green Monk is a dreambox or a sweatbox of a sugar skull. A black hole full of hairspray and cigarette butts where the deer are twitching. It is the great urn of space dust where yellow yolk drips down the wall. These poems are migration and immigration across various physical and imaginary, spatial and temporal, fields; journeys, healings, and transformations; the illusions of self that each new self is born into. Written between London, Madrid, and Krakow, it engages thrillingly with various surrealist visions of artists and poets, including Leonora Carrington, Salvador Dali, García Lorca, James Tate, and Chika Sagawa. It concerns, variously, erotics, animism and magic; food, death and sublime nature; fairy tales and alchemy, mixed up with the wonders of everyday life. It is simultaneously contemporary and ancient, built on visual images and techniques of juxtaposition and collage, into entertainingly absurd narratives.
Author
Born in Portadown, Northern Ireland, I have made my home in Turkey, Poland, Italy, South Korea, the United States, Spain, and the United Kingdom – experiences that inform my absurd-surreal stories. My writing has been translated into Danish and Polish & featured in the Best British Poetry series. My essays, stories, poems, and reviews have appeared in various anthologies and magazines in Europe and North America, including Tin House, Fence, 3:AM, Sprung Formal, Rain Taxi, Poetry, and Versopolis Review. I have performed my work at various festivals and art galleries in Prague, Madrid, London, Bristol, Manchester, North Carolina, and Ireland. Currently, I live in Castelldefels, Spain and teach high school literature in Barcelona. My debut novel, Never Mind the Beasts, is available from Dostoyevsky Wannabe. "Marcus Slease’s ‘Never Mind the Beasts’: probably the wildest bildungsroman since ‘Anti-Oedipus’; imagine Joyce’s ‘Portrait…’ being retold by a Leopold Bloom on a mission to steal back epiphanies from standarized marketing. An essential, liberating read." Matt Travers, broke Mayakovsky fan "Writing actually as love! Marcus Slease’s crinkling, crackling prose is full of sparks, full of troubles, full of wonder. Never Mind the Beasts radiates with the force, brevity and immediacy of stylists like Mary Robison, Rikki Ducornet and Diane Williams. “The demand to love,” wrote Roland Barthes at the beginning of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes; “overflows, leaks, skids, shifts, slips”. “Writing to touch with letters, with lips, with breath,” wrote Hélène Cixous in Coming to Writing. These are the thrilling, vibratory spaces, movements and possibilities Slease’s writing opens up." Colin Herd, author of You Name It "Say Lydia Davis and Donald Barthelme had a son, and his life story was painted by Basquiat, and the paintings were ground up into a spice, then used to flavour a crazy-hot dish you just can’t stop eating while the scenery shifts around you: that taste might be something like Never Mind the Beasts." Ruby Cowling, author of This Paradise "robust pro aktiv quixotik goes evreewher is from evreewher nouns ar verbs verbs ar yu a nu way uv intraktivitee langwage th narrativ rocks takes yu evreewher thers no conclewsyun its in th going poignant tragik ekstatik have anothr box top meeting yu at th melting grange th adventurs dont stop home keeps mooving evn yu dont need 2 carree th props opn ths wun up each page fluid change meeting yu in yu alive wundrful a great xperiens ths book." bill bissett, author of Breth /the treez uv lunaria
