Johannes Göransson
Dear Ra - $16
Dear Ra: A Story in Flinches
"The poet is someone who notices that language, that his language, the language
he inherits . . . risks becoming a dead language again and that therefore
he has the responsibility, a very grave responsibility, to wake it up, to
resuscitate it . . . neither as an immortal body nor as a glorious body but
as a mortal body, fragile and at times indecipherable."
Derrida
In Dear Ra, an indeterminate text comprised of
letters, resembling both fiction and poetry but not wholly comfortable in
either category, if the task is to wake up the language, each sentence answers
the challenge, stabbing at one like a beautiful murderer.
In Dear Ra, we are told, among many other things,
that 'narrative equals death.' If that is so, then Johannes Göransson's
21st-century epistolary novel is very much alive, as it bobs and weaves through
the mundane details and arcane allusions of our culture, filled with feints
and jabs in all directions, warding off the threat of premature closure. Dear
Ra is sharp, funny, morbid, and deliriously (re)readable.
Steven Shaviro, author of The Cinematic Body and Connected
"Love letters. Love poetry. Like this: 'You know how I love it when you don't
make sense. But most of all I love the way you whimper when your pants are
down. So much for Petrarch,' the Italian poet praising his Laura in sonnets.
Johannes Göransson's letters to an ex-lover Ra -- as well as the letters
in this book to the radiator, history, Susan Sontag, America, poetry itself--come
from a poet whose 'heart [and poetics] belongs to a drive-by shooting.' Reading
them is to be invited into the theater of utterly mixed metaphors where nothing
follows; which is to say, a theater of memory where everything can follow:
an amazing high-wire act of body and soul, language and thought where 'even
the circus gets eaten alive.'" Steve Tomasula,
author of Vas and The Book of Portraiture
"Solarity's always about empire, sort of. Johannes Göransson's delerious
letters to the Egyptian sun God are definitely in America, somewhere between
Frank O'Hara's Mayakovsky and Georges Bataille's Vincent Van Gogh. 'I can't
jack off without history peering in,' he writes. Me neither."
Ariana Reines, author of The Cow
Johannes Göransson was born and raised in Skane, Sweden, but has lived
in the US for many years. He is co-editor of Action Books and has translated
the work of Aase Berg, Henry Parland, Ann Jaderlund and other Swedish and
Finland Swedish poets.
AUTHOR BLOG: "EXOSKELETON"
Contact: Ted Pelton, Editor, Starcherone Books, P.O. Box 303, Buffalo,
NY 14201
Phone: 716-885-2726. Fax: 716-884-0291. E-mail: ted@starcherone.com
PUBLICATIONDATE: October 1, 2008
PRICE: $16.00; 96 pp
ISBN-13: 978-0-9788811-2-2; ISBN-10: 0-9788811-2-5
PRINT RUN: 1000
BOOK TOUR: Chicago, New York, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, others TBA.