{ AN ISLAND OF FIFTY a novel(la) by Ben Brooks
  | $12 BUY (email for international orders) [ 156 pgs., perfect-bound ]
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advance praise : AN ISLAND OF FIFTY is a new literary bomb, resulting in the shrapnel of gold, ships, ocean, chandeliers, dreams, blood, & flame. Old & stale literature won't know what just hit. This is something new masking itself in the old & I'm so so so excited Shane Jones, author of LIGHT BOXES Ben Brooks is popping quarks with AN ISLAND OF FIFTY, spilling new flavors of literature on the swampy bookstacks of old. Call it new political, new ecological, new sociological, new poetic activism, or even new imaginary creationism. This book builds up to tear down & tears down to build up. Desire as melancholia, progress as slippage, & wanting for wanting’s sake. The floodgates crumble. I relish the shape of this new wordspace, the play of noise & whisper, the unfamiliar voices, & the ache of nihilism paradoxically juxtaposed with the gleam of hopeful invention. Christopher Higgs, author of THE COMPLETE WORKS OF MARVIN K. MOONEY | |
an excerpt : Marsha lays paths & tears them up. The mill is in sight. Eyes are wretched chunks of light. I carry in my palms her heart & it throbs with the pulse of a lion. She drinks oxblood on the island. There is a mill on an island. I am weary but my feet pulse with the throb of a chariot: ONWARD. Marsha talks of beauty with the Hotelier. He is African-American. Watch his gargantuan jaw swell with words. They stand beside the marble monolith, beside the mill, beside the chariot, beneath the charioteer. The charioteer, the hotelier claims, breathes saffron & lives within the trunk of a great oak. He bites into the claws of crabs & washes taste away with woodbines. He pays for cold coffee skinned girls from the ships to gyrate against his spine. Marsha feigns horror & lifts her skirt. She draws the cross over her breast. The blades of the mill begin to show cracks & the orphans grow restless. People are checking out. There is a small man in the mill who spins thread & bloodies his wrinkled fingers. One day they will fold, his mother says. Let them die, he tells her. reviews / interviews : | |