[By which we mean: Copies of these new titles are available for review at Tarpaulin Sky. Yay! Email reviews@…. –And be sure to let us know what you thought about Rauan Klassnik’s prior Black Ocean title, Holy Land, or Aase Berg’s With Deer.]
Dark Matter
by Aase Berg
Translated by Johannes Göransson
Paperback / 188p. / Poetry / $14.95
ISBN 978-0-9844752-8-5
From the publisher:
Berg’s hallucinatory, post-cataclysmic epic takes place in an unremitting future-past. The bodies mutate and hybridize. They are erotic and artificial, art and adrenaline. Available for the first time in English as a complete collection, the poems of this contemporary Swedish classic contaminate as they become contaminated—drawing on and altering source texts that range from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to string theory. Calling on fables, science, the pastoral, and the body, Dark Matter aggravates their perception while exhausting poetry down to its nerve: “a faint spasm of cheers before this, the nervous system’s last chance to communicate with the dying I.” The result: a monstrous zone of linguistic and bodily interpenetration, cell death, and radiant permutations.
Praise for Dark Matter
“Extraordinary and urgent, a coded warning smuggled out of dark.”—China Miéville
“Aase Berg’s poetry is discomforting because it lacks boundaries . . . When I read her I notice how my consciousness tries to separate, divide up and make sense of her almost hallucinatory images, but they always glide back together. I get nauseous and almost seasick from her texts.”—Åsa Beckman, author of I Myself A House of Light – Postmodern Swedish Women Poets
The Moon’s Jaw
by Rauan Klassnik
Paperback / 76p. / Poetry / $14.95
ISBN 978-0-9844752-7-8
From the publisher:
The poems of The Moon’s Jaw are a portrait of rotting decadence: wastelands of body and soul radioactive with death, cruelty, and a dark gleaming perverse sexuality. The language, flow, and rhythms of Rauan Klassnik’s second collection seem to revel in themselves, stagnate, bog down, wallow. As Klassnik writes, “There’s no way out but we don’t stop trying” and here, we find a wasteland spectrum, from a playground, a twisted eden that lurches forward—despite a swollen turgid gravity of blurred gender and godlessness and wheel-spinning ruts—to an obsessive and persistently striving narrative of death, gender, corruption, and (anti)religion.
Praise for The Moon’s Jaw:
“It’s full of knives and silk and peacocks and breast milk and ghosts and fetuses and orchards and wounds and girls and suns. It shifts continually between horny and cruel tones, meditative and exacting tones, stiff and puffy images, swallowed up somewhere in the space between all bodies, where nature mutates and crushes you and grinds against itself forever. There’s a constant succession of murder and regrowth, as if no matter how many times you undo a person they’re still here wandering around half-erased. It feels terse and epic at the same time, like the old surrealists, but suited for our age of insane kids. It’s like a Jacuzzi full of semen. A sky-blue hacksaw.”—VICE magazine
“In the wound of a stabbed cosmos, Rauan Klassnik’s moon, kin to Plath’s moon bald and wild, bucks against despair. Anytime we devour the queen, we will be forced to vomit her back up, a clean saint out of our foaming mouths. A pretty swell in the music. We’re not afraid of the cinema, even though it houses all our night-mares. We’re not afraid to die. Marble, Tequila, Rotted, Flapping. The myth of biological sex, the myth of biological stability [l]ike cathedral meat. Wrapped in a thin red towel.”—Danielle Pafunda