Description
Book Synopsis‘Where can the human animal seek its energy in this era of lockdowns and social distancing? Dodge may help us to find out’ Guardian
‘If you’re a fan of Maggie Nelson’s work, you’ll like this book. It’s truly beautiful’ Dazed
Is love a force akin to gravity? A kind of invisible fabric which enables communications through space and time? Artist Harry Dodge finds himself contemplating such questions as his father declines from dementia and he rekindles a bewildering but powerful relationship with his birth mother. A meteorite Dodge orders on eBay becomes a mysterious catalyst for a reckoning with the vital forces of matter, the nature of consciousness, and the bafflements of belonging.
Structured around a series of formative, formidable coincidences in Dodge’s life, My Meteorite journeys with stylistic bravura from Barthes to Blade Runner, from punk to Pale Fire. It is a wild, incandescent book that creates a literary universe of its own. Blending the personal and the philosophical, the raw and the surreal, the transgressive and the heartbreaking, Harry Dodge revitalizes our world, illuminating the magic just under the surface of daily life.
'Holds you in its thrall like a brilliant friend. Dodge is a masterful writer' Miranda July
Trade ReviewDodge has offered a new, luminous angle on autobiography that not only traces where the body has been—but also what it loves, how it thinks and feels within the potent intellectual and physical detritus of its lived world. Reading this book is like being bathed in the bright, gritty sear of a comet's tail. But the mark it leaves is stunningly terrestrial: a thumbprint of a mind on paper—singular in erudition, hurtfully wonder-struck, and true. * Ocean Vuong *
Harry Dodge’s voice and vision are singular, but his genius is for revealing how each of us is plural. This is a beautiful record of his loves and deaths and ways of making, but even its most intimate moments open out, become portals to other possible worlds. No genre can hold this book. It is a work of tender force, prying open every category.
My Meteorite is breathtaking—or breathgiving, because the whole thing oxygenates discourse, makes me feel alive. * Ben Lerner *
My Meteorite holds you in its thrall like a brilliant friend—so vulnerable, hot, funny, and casually weird that you don't notice the profundity until you're already walloped by it. Dodge juxtaposes the tenderest of human details with hungry, brain-splitting inquiries into the very premise of life, and these shifts in scale are incredibly moving and provocative. Don't forget to notice that Dodge is a captivating and masterful writer; that's how he pulls this whole thing off. * Miranda July *
Reading
My Meteorite, I feel re-enchanted, all over again, with how miraculous an enterprise writing can be, when it is engaged with the degree of passion, inquisitiveness, and arrowy verbal virtuosity that Dodge brings to the game. Feel your whole body tingle as you read this blazing ode to randomness, to a cosmos where every particle and wave has a say in the matter. * Wayne Koestenbaum *
A sense of simultaneity and infinitude shapes My Meteorite, which is at once memoir, studio diary and futuristic consideration of artificial intelligence and algorithms… Within the book, as in the soup of consciousness, everything is happening all at once; there are no fixed states… The recursive nature of the text captures the workings of memory and evinces a high-pressure, poetic approach to narrative and language that is also evident in much of Dodge’s raucous and extremely funny video work. -- Kate Wolf * Frieze *
