Nouveau’s Midnight Sun: Transcriptions from Golgonooza and Beyond
edited by John Allen

Description

Edited by John Thomas Allen, this collection of modern Surrealist poetry carries, as Andrew Joron has said, the revolutionizing force of Surrealism into the twenty-first century, offering a stellar gathering of writers that includes Julian Semilian, Lee Ballentine, Adam Cornford, Mark Statman, David Lehman, Joseph Lease, Peter Cherches, Allen Parmenter, John Olson, Christina Zawadiwsky, J. Karl Bogartte, David Shapiro, Donna Snyder, Bruce Boston, Brian Lucas, Marilyn Kallet, John Yau, Sutton Breiding, Kathryn Rantala, and the editor.  An extensive historical and philosophical introduction by the editor provides insight into the birth of this anthology as well as relevant biographies for the contributors.  Onward Surrealists! (Christopher Merrill)

See the long but interesting review from The Fiend Journal, Blackpool, England.

Comments:

“Nouveau’s Midnight Sun carries the revolutionizing force of surrealism into the twenty-first century. This much-needed anthology shows that surrealism, in renewing itself, has not mutated beyond recognition, but only has brought forth the farther, deeper implications of the original Manifestoes. As eccentric to established culture as Breton would have wished, these poems, in rewriting & rerouting surrealism, still know to bring the outside in.” (Andrew Joron)

“Born out of “deranged fever,” as the author John Thomas Allen puts it, the Noveau’s Midnight Sun: Transcriptions from Golgonooza and Beyond emanates from his insatiable quest for the angels and demons (theories and principles) of surrealism, as a phantom that haunts him even when he was bedridden and convalescing from a harrowing Lyme disease. Allen has methodically gathered leading post-postmodern surrealist poets and artists to reecho the vision of the Surrealist movement founder André Breton. Albeit stylish and highly refined from its avant-garde predecessor, the surrealist poets and artists explore motley themes that define what surrealism is in the 21st century, from a movement of chance, dream, and anarchy to an aesthetic of oddity, deviancy, science fiction, magic realism, ambivalence, absurdity, and decay. The author’s introductory essay alone is, in itself, an inimitable literary piece akin to Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra.” (Danny Castillones Sillada)

“The innovative writings in this anthology stretch language into brilliant new hallucinatory shapes. Like absinthe mixed with Red Bull, they will ruin your waking hours the way you didn’t know you wanted them ruined.” (The innovative writings in this anthology stretch language into brilliant new hallucinatory shapes. Like absinthe mixed with Red Bull, they will ruin your waking hours the way you didn’t know you wanted them ruined.)