Thursday, November 11, 2010

At Trotsky’s Funeral, Mark Young

Kilmog Press
Edition of 50, hardback, 44 pages
ISBN: 978-0-9864616-8-2
RRP: $45.00

At Trotsky's Funeral is a companion volume to the author's speculative novella, the allegrezza ficcione, which has already been described as "a 21st century classic".
It gathers together nearly all of the poems & short prose pieces that Mark Young calls, collectively, ficciones, a term coined by Jorge Luis Borges. They're not about alternative universes, rather histories of the current one tweaked a little—Genghis Khan as a member of the Barnum & Bailey circus, the movies that accompanied Mao's Long March, the origins of the popular song Bye Bye Blackbird & the bullfighting move known as the veronica.

Martin Edmond, in his Landfall review of Pelican Dreaming: Poems 1959-2008, wrote: "These ficciones both parody and explode causality as it is usually understood and thereby make available to us, not just an alternate past to our provisional present but a future literally beyond our understanding: as a real future must be."

About the author
Mark Young's poetry first appeared in the N. Z. Listener in 1959. Since then, his text & visual poems, prose, essays & reviews have been published & anthologized in many countries, in both print & online journals, & have been translated into a number of languages. He is the author of more than twenty books, published primarily in the U.S.A., but also in Finland, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden & the U.K.

Available at Parsons Bookshop in Auckland & Dunedin Public Art Gallery Shop.

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