The Animal - Prose Poetics by Louis E. Bourgeois

Gritty and lyric, Bourgeois's writing entwines the earthy particulars of a remembered rural south, with surrealist dream images. His dark wit employs vernacular and mythic motifs to create an original universe. His is a voice to watch for in American poetry. -Celia Rabinovitch, author of Surrealism and the Sacred Bourgeois is a major 'French' voice in American letters. -Ernest Hekkanen, The New Orphic Review Bourgeois's fragments explore the extremities of the creative act, with both brilliance and an implosive setting-awry of the very notion of the poetic art, which is here cast as a revelatory performance art of words-'everything is legal now', with the ash-strewn gestures of concentration-camp or genocidal erasure compacted with the absurd futility of social and political designs and narratives. This poetry is denuded and lavishly stripped to the primed for impacts on its spectators' eyes. -Stephen Barber, author of Blows and Bombs and The Art of Destruction Bourgeois's 'Askesis' is a sort of time-warp-a return to the Surrealist games of random association and the juxtaposition of wildly unrelated images to create a new poetic whole. But where the Surrealist experiments were for the most part unreadable, Bourgeois's brief prose poems carry a sinister force that keeps you reading. -Ruth Brandon, author of Surreal Lives