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."  Publisher’s 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

Copyright © 2008 Starcherone Books