The Blood Poetry by Leland Pitts-Gonzalez
My rating: 3/5 cats
She has become ravenous, the way hydrochloric acid depletes your face.
hmmm, experimental horror novels…i’m kind of a giant shrug on this review. there are authors who do this style, and do it well, but i have never really been into them, so i feel a little out of my depth. people who are into matthew stokoe or burroughs will probably like this book, and the back cover calls it A Bataille sitcom full of meat and mommies. which could be accurate or could just be a pithy soundbite. (patrick bateman’s name is dropped in the same blurb, and i believe this character is the exact opposite of patrick bateman, so i don’t know how much trust to put in this comparison to bataille. i’ve only read story of the eye, so.)
but the book is tricky. it is enamored with offbeat wordplay (see above), and it employs stream-of-consciousness and stilted non sequitur-conversations and unreliable narrators to do all the storytelling. so, after all that layering, i’m not sure how much of the action is “real” and how much are delusions, and how much is metaphor.
“What am i doing here?” she asks.
“Solace, perhaps? Kinship? I don’t know much about that.”
“I’ve got Armageddon in my grips.” She holds the dinosaur up to her chest. Her eyes are tired, pretty much super nova to the extreme.
“His name is my being,” I say.
“Did Mom call?”
“No, honey.” I’m fond of Sylvia’s eyebrows because they’re a bit mangled. There’s something rabbit about her. For a moment, we just lock eyes and there is equilibrium in the world. You see, Sylvia, it happened like this: my life. There it is all for you to see and my heart races. There’s urgency in clarity, sort of like scolding a retarded child with a stick simply for being alive. Here for you to see, my daughter, is your father. I am. “Honey,” is all i can manage. “For the life of me, I can’t think of the right thing to say.”
She forgives me. I can see this in her complete disregard of my confession. She rolls over, grabs a cig, and lights it. I don’t bother to tell her to put it out.
“Can I have one?” I ask.
She gives me one.
I smoke. Incandescence is the beauty of cancer. We share this like we share nothing else. We lie in bed like that, smoking it off, enjoying the release.
so, to me, as someone who is relatively neutral to poetry, this is just a lot of sound and fury. i’m not sure what “super nova” (sic) eyes would be, or what clarity has to do with child-beating, or how cancer is incandescent.
but i also don’t understand what i am the walrus is about either, and, to be honest, i don’t even like the beatles, which i know leaves me in the minority, so this could resonate with people who are really into more surreal literature. it isn’t about what words mean, but how they flow and how they appear typed alongside each other…nah, who am i kidding? i hate that argument, which i have heard before. words mean what they mean. sounding pretty means nothing. there are so many words. find one that work to say what you mean.you can do the surreal and the evocative and still make sense, like beckett.
the father-and-daughter in bed together, “smoking it off, enjoying the release” is no twss accident. there are plenty of incestuous themes running through here. also cannibalism, vampirism, conjoined twins in the role of mystic-sage(s), erotic violence, a fascination with serial killers, autism, both spiritual and literal rebirth, and lots of menstrual blood.
it is strange to me to feel so indifferent to a book that is obviously trying to push all the shock buttons, but there it is. i think someone with a stronger bent towards the surreal grotesque would dig this, but for me, it was taking too many liberties with language, and ultimately undermining its own story with clever stylization.
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