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The story connects in many ways to its predecessor, 2020’s The Death of the Cyborg Oracle, but stands on its own as a wild, conceptual, playfully written ride. And though hints of Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, and Aldous Huxley abound, it is utterly original—principally because its world is neither utopian, nor dystopian, but somewhere uniquely in between.
Jenny, 52 is a kind of meta fiction about the nature of storytelling, fiction versus reality, in a manner reminiscent of Philip Roth (My Life as a Man, in particular, and all of the Nathan Zuckerman novels generally). Jenny, 52 is made up of seventeen one- to three-page “chapters,” most of which are narrated in the voice of the writer Jenny.
There is a lightness of touch here coupled with an assuredly quiet voice that has an expansive quality, equating the intellectual and the botanical, the flowering of ranunculus with human flowering, and the sensual nature of the earth with the rest of the universe. The poems deftly change their perspective through space and time so that all times feel concurrent and all things seem equal, continually in the state of transformation and yet always available.
At once informative and poetic, Hong’s writing is infused with sharp wit and biting irony, making it both engaging and nuanced. Minor Feelings serves as an essential guide for those navigating multiple identities and offers both lay and scholarly readers a profound understanding of the vast literary and artistic contributions these marginalized communities have made to the ever-evolving landscape of American culture.
I read this book in just over a day, pushing back other commitments because I couldn’t bear to stop. The book is full of suspense which Kalagian Blunt creates in all sorts of ways. The most notable is her terrific characterisation. The main protagonist, Harlow, drives the narrative forward with just the right combination of intellectual acumen, warmth and anxiety. The reader becomes invested in Harlow and her desperate search for her missing father Scott.
Kazim Ali is a literary artist and polymath who so delights in language and possibility that he created a chrono-synclastic infundibulate safe space wherein physics are presented in a way that makes the moon even lovelier to poets and presumably presents poetry as lovely to physicists. Ali learned “how to use [his] breath to experience [his] body and the external world with deeper focus and deliberation.”
I spoke with Stuart over Zoom to discuss the dangers of beauty, the difficulties of depicting atrocity in art, and the value of humor in dark times.
Despite the profane subjects: dole queues, building sites, and the bottom of coffee cups; Fyfe elevates the ordinary to extraordinary heights with captivating imagery, and a musicality that gently lulls the reader into a meditative trance. In ‘A Song for Saint Roch’ ‘two pristine cigarettes’ are juxtaposed with ‘two (painted) apples’: elevating the former to high art reminiscent of ‘The Plastic Bag Scene’ in the film American Beauty; viewed through a poet’s lens, to seek beauty from the most mundane items.
Cyborg Fever is a hallucinatory universe of detached disembodied voices and isolated monads – leptons, bosons, black holes, and human beings — forever striving for a ‘unified field’ but forever defeated by entropy and the forces of dissolution, vast emptiness, and disarray.