At Publishers Weekly, praise for Blake Butler’s forthcoming Sky Saw suggests that something more than the alphabet necessitates placing Butler next to Burroughs on our bookshelf:

For the apocalyptically minded Butler, language isn’t employed simply to tell a story, but to register decay—and the prose of his latest novel is so meticulous, claustrophobic, and virtuosic that it’s almost painful to read. But it’s a pain that his fans, for whom Butler is the 21st-century answer to William S. Burroughs, have come to crave. In a nightmarish landscape of filthy, flickering rooms, unrelenting cameras, and writhing bodies under a hallucinatory sky, a supposedly omnipotent “Cone” holds sway over a mass of drones. Person 1180 gives birth to a large number of horrifying children she indoctrinates with a book of disappearing words, while sinister men sneak into her house at night. Her onetime husband, Person 811, awakens far from home and tries to find his way back through memory and rancid techno-biological detritus, while being pursued by a headless doppelgänger. But the details of Blake’s dystopia are more often suggested than stated and words are as likely to turn into birds, skin to rupture, the air to become liquid poison. Tidy paragraphs disassemble and all but ooze across the page, as Butler (Nothing) replicates the sensory experience of his mutating panorama at the sentence level. For readers willing to annihilate their boundaries, this is the ideal entry point.

Also at Publishers Weekly, Danielle Pafunda’s newest collection of poems, Manhater, gets some deserved love:

Lifting a page from Plath’s book of tricks, Pafunda comes out swinging in her fourth book with poems that tackle that other half of the parental nightmare, Mommy. “Mommy must eat,” she writes in the book’s opening sequence, because “every morning/ comes hard into the room and frisks you to death.” By stitching this infantile name to her own hem, Pafunda exposes the conflicts of motherhood: her lust and refusal to carry herself as a symbol of fecundity make for some frightening conflations. In the same poem where “Mommy’s brood wails,” Pafunda asks herself how long it’s been “since she had her hand/ down a woebegone hunk’s steamy front” and tells us with a grin that “Mommy’s fist is popping her frame.” For Pafunda, the body following birth is both a source of revelry and disgust, and she likes to welcome us in with one hand and warn us away with the other. “There is a pit,” she writes, “in which worms have grown/ as thick as my wrist.” A mother’s inner life in this book is rife with passionate ambivalence.

You want to know two more great things about Manhater? It’s published by Dusie and distributed by SPD.

Just a week ago, we noted the excellent review of Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Since then, not one but two reviews have appeared: by Sabrina Dalla Valle, at NYQ Reviews, and by the editors at Chewing Wormwood.

Says Valle:

While gnawing at the bones of critical theory and philosophy, Schizophrene is a description of pure creative thinking, a narrative without a directed conclusion – yet a direct connection to life through the experience of nerve frequencies and tissue connectivity. “‘If you touch it, its yours,’ says the butcher to the house/wife as she extends her hands towards the ham. In this way,/you are the velvet body of a boy or girl, the raised part of/the pattern.” This work is treacherous. The brutal truth of social vulnerability becomes identical with the author through touch; it is chewed, fragmented, dissolved and purified into a river of blood. And in this magical contagion, with her, we too swallow it knowing that “An economy is/ a system of apparently willing but actually involuntary/ exchanges. A family, for example, is really a shopfront, a/ glass plate open to the street.” But if the transparent boundary becomes fluid, then “1. Nobody is [emigrant].”