Leslie Scalapino
Floats Horse-Floats
or Horse-Flows - $18
Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows
Miners, polar bears, insurgents sweeping the desert in Toyota pickups, a detective
on the trail of illegal fur traders, Venus Williams' deconstructed forehand,
wild horses, blooming chrysanthemums, tadpoles eating corpses in the Euphrates,
and so much more Leslie Scalapino's Floats Horse-Floats
or Horse-Flows is a startlingly beautiful, politically engaged, poetic
novel. Narrative moments arrive out of inchoate states an alexia where unknown
words create a future and the reader is continually and unexpectedly moved
by the buoyancy and breathtaking velocity of Leslie Scalapino's language.
"This is a jewel book that has come out of the spagyric hinterlands of purest
imagination, where it has lain for an immeasurable time alongside Burroughs's
Cities of the Red Night, Hans Arp's poetry, Monkey's
Journey to the West, and Mark Twain's Mysterious
Stranger and it blows with the elegance of a horse or a wolf...Virginia
Woolf." Michael McClure, author of Scratching the
Beat Surface
"Leslie Scalapino's writing reveals how far language and therefore thought
itself can go beyond what we are accustomed to, and the forms in which she
writes delightfully defy our expectations. Yet her work is infused with a
seriousness, a passion, a timeliness, and an intelligence with which we profoundly
identify. A new book by Leslie Scalapino is always! cause for celebration."
Lydia Davis, author of Samuel Johnson is Indignant
"What is an event anyway? This is a question Scalapino has explored before,
but never quite as she does here. There is the known world where 'one-box-fits-all-words'
make 'even plants indistinguishable from humans.' And then there is the world
Scalapino creates, a world of fresh encounters where the 'hartebeest is wandering'
and the 'vast shimmying fractionation is heard.' This other world isn't Eden,
though it might seem so at first. Like the one we know, this world is filled
with disaster and violence. The difference is that here we don't see it coming;
we can't hide behind dead verbiage; we can't brace ourselves." Rae
Armantrout, author of Versed
"Floats Horse-floats or Horse-flows is an action
novel. Using aspects of adventure, science fiction, and crime, Leslie Scalapino
presents and represents an interwoven series that carries you along, ready
or not. In fact, in this writing the sense of the present is the central action
for the writer and the reader, as well as for the characters. 'No really it's
one thing at a time but all at once...' There are horses and they do float
and flow. In fact, there are pictures of this, as well as other photos. The
sense of floating and flow is intricately, one might almost say intimately,
maintained. There is time travel or, at least multiple times…. It is
a wild ride." Laura Moriarty, author of A Semblance
Praise for previous works:
"Scalapino fuses a richly detached Buddhist mindfulness with an algorithmically
precise disjunctive syntax to explore sex, gender and violence their politics
and their moment-to-moment embodiedness." Publishers
Weekly
"Leslie Scalapino's poems probe politics, memory, perception, and desire,
creating hypnotically shifting coherences that take us beyond any dislocating
devices into a realm of newly emerging consciousness. This work, which defies
categorization, is essential for contemporary poetry." Charles
Bernstein, author of Girly Man
LESLIE SCALAPINO has previously won an American Book Award from the Before
Columbus Foundation, the Poetry Center Award from San Francisco State University,
and the Lawrence Lipton Prize. Her work has also appeared in numerous anthologies
and in both the Best American Poetry and the
Pushcart Prize series. She has long been associated with the poetry of the
Language School, but in recent years has branched out into fiction, autobiography,
and inter-genre work. This is her 4th full-length work of fiction and her
first publication with Starcherone Books.
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: March 15, 2010
PRICE: $18.00
ISBN-13: 978-0-9788811-9-1; ISBN-10: 0-9788811-9-2
PRINT RUN: 1000