Johannes Göransson

Literary Nonfiction. "This slim journal contains multitudes. It's a compulsively readable account of returning to a childhood home, a provocative meditation on artists such as Susan Sontag, Francesca Woodman, and Andrei Tarkovsky, and a radical reexamination of concepts like ruin porn, tourism, and translation. But mostly it's an urgent manifesto. 'Poetry is obscene, ' Göransson writes. 'But there are those who want to maintain the illusion that it is good for us.' This necessary book strips away the various illusions that have obscured poetry's truest values. Göransson concludes: 'This is written without hope.' But paradoxically, POETRY AGAINST ALL offers just that."--Jeff Jackson "Moralists who find themselves clutching their pearls about this book of noir perversions should read less literally and see that Göransson's POETRY AGAINST ALL--for all its anti-libidinous interrogations of pornography, the Holocaust, and cadavers--concerns some of the most relatably humanist emotions of all: grief, the meaning of home, and the protectiveness one has about one's children. Göransson imagines pornography as the body at the edge of otherness, at once alluring and perverse, which is not unlike the lens through which he conceives his own role as immigrant, the contaminant in our body politic, alive to the sheer horror of America but never quite able to go home himself."--Ken Chen

A Diary

Poetry Against All

Poetry. "It's as though his poetry takes us to the forest in Lars von Trier's Anti-Christ, where it's filmed, but then suddenly we find ourselves standing in front of a vanished movie theatre of our home. Goransson's poetry is a film that Death peeks at, the scene of shooting the film, the film shot on a roll of film, the movie theatre, the Arcadia. A single poem is the world's interior and exterior, it convulses wildly like an animal that has eaten the poem's interior and exterior all together with silver. bang bang." Kim Hyesoon "'I make a language out of the bleed-through.' Goransson sure as fuck does. These poems made me cry. So sad and anxious and genius and glarey bright." Rebecca Loudon"

The Sugar Book

Aase Berg

Transfer Fat

Kim Yideum

Poetry. Asian American Studies. Translated from the Korean by Ji yoon Lee, Don Mee Choi and Johannes Göransson. "Kim Yi-Deum's poetry is the landscape of confession. The confession flows inside the landscape and the landscape soars inside the confession. These two elements of her poetry are interconnected in the way eros gets pulled up to the divine place. Her poetry appears as poetry, it also appears as prose. As poetry, it's polyphonic, and as prose, it's defiant. Her poetry is the theater of multiple personality. You hear the voices of hundreds of people, hundreds of things. These naked living things become her poetic subjects. In each poem, the different sensations of each body are invented. She punishes herself and accepts her own unsightly, gutless face. Her poetry is engaged in the difficult process of discovering the other inside her. Her rhythm, which emerges from the fishnet of interconnections, bites power and sets her free."—Kim Hyesoon

Femme Fatale

Cheer Up

Joyelle McSweeney

Text comprises one essay by each author "incorporating cutting-edge media theory, the aesthetics of abjection, and theories of disability as they apply to translation"--Publishers website.

Deformation Zone

Poetry. Welcome to Johannes "private genocide," ground zero for figurative language. Put on your best pig smile and meet the gratuitous martyrs, Kublai Khan, Colin Powell, the jackle-hearted masses, Herman Melville, Egyptian dogs, and the Coca-Cola Cowboys. They're all in the burning barn at the Big Dance where the Ballad of the Pig Circus plays like a torso full of "October of birds." Beauty becomes "a riddle doused in gasoline" in this Postmodern epic that mixes surrealist impulses with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E-esqe prosody. Notions of genre are demolished and language itself seems relegated to a wildly impossible epistemological space that is something akin to "whispering in hammers" or "speaking in silhouettes." If this sounds confusing, don't worry, the poet has sewn it all together with a "travesty of stitches," and he has "left his body inside the allegory." The poet satirizes, prods, pastiches, and "grotesquerizes" until every assumption we have, cultural or personal, crumbles in re-invented idiom.

A New Quarantine Will Take My Place

In Dear Ra, and 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.

Johannes Göransson

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