Search results for ""Author Mark Tardi""

It could be in Chernobyl, in Chicago, or in the future; it could be “the Brooklyn Vampire” Albert Fish penning a letter to a grieving mother or “the Yorkshire Ripper” Peter Sutcliffe being described by his paranoid schizophrenic wife; it could be the birth of a child turned literally inside out in a world “more wolf than lion, more hyena than either”; and it could be you, dear reader, “not a person, but a doubt contemptuous of stone and silence and time itself.” In The Circus of Trust, Mark Tardi implicates us all in a pastoral of detritus where “the same indifferent sun” unflinchingly tracks devastation as part of the most routine actions. Whether the violence is architectural, biological, geological, or technological, we’re warned that atrocity is the most resilient form of human currency: “You don’t have to step on a body to carry death on your shoes.”

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The Squatters' Gift is a poetic travelogue through numerous languages and locales, both real and imaginary. Like Miron Białoszewski, Paul Celan and Tristan Tzara before him, Rybicki excavates syllable and song, mind and muck, to invent a transnational poetry pointedly unapologetic and utterly unique. Karol Maliszewski observes that Rybicki has taken over from the Surrealists and the Dadaists: “the hero of these poems is language –– escaping from a man and suddenly returning in flashes and dazzles." The opening lines of The Squatters’ Gift, is reminiscent of a sort of vagabond Jack Gladney from Don DeLillo’s acclaimed White Noise, wandering the supermarket aisles in a consumerist haze: “The supermarket / melts / like a chocolate bar: / a dendrite stack.” But the comparison is short-lived and far too simplistic. It is only tenable if the comforts of ritualized shopping are multi-lingual and multi-dimensional, Greek mythology intersecting with 1980s Polish punk music, poetic string theory and time travel and psychedelic dumpster diving all rolled into one. It is this wanderlust and these sorts of imaginative leaps that animate much of The Squatters’ Gift and make it so incredible.

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