Unsettling and hypnotic…
Paisley delivers an electrifying collection of absurdist interludes in his latest book. In the hallowed “tradition” of the avant-garde, these pieces do what that tradition does best—unseat tradition itself. The ten pieces within—if they qualify as stories at all—unspool like fevered confessions, unreliable yet impossible to ignore.
“Flâneurysm” drifts through both external and internal landscapes, where movement itself becomes a means of self-definition and erasure. “Reinformation Theory” warps perception and communication, reducing meaning to an unstable, flickering illusion. “Diplomat in Ebony” grapples with identity, negotiation, and the absurdities of power, thrusting its protagonist into the collision of cultural expectations and political theater. “The Prince of Pee” revels in absurdity, skewering authority, status, and the petty manifestations of power. Meanwhile, the pipe, both literal and metaphorical, becomes a vessel for memory, communication, and time itself in “Pipe.” “The Cigar, or Fate’s Floating Ember” smolders with pleasure, transience, and the capriciousness of fate. “Spirit and Corpus” wrestles with the porous boundary between body and soul, reality and illusion. The collection’s most visceral moments pulse in “Daffodil in Ecstasy!,” a fever dream of eroticism and violence, and “The Revised Minutes,” where memory is rewritten with the manic precision of a paranoiac grasping for coherence.
Paisley’s writing is dense, lyrical, and unrelenting in its intensity. Sentences stretch, twist, and sometimes disintegrate into near-gibberish, only to snap back into razor-sharp clarity. This linguistic excess is no accident: Paisley wields language as a malleable force, dismantling narrative conventions and thought itself. At times, the writing feels like an incantation, a fevered attempt to summon the unsayable. The result is both dizzying and electrifying; exhausting for some, intoxicating for others, but impossible to ignore. The book resists easy interpretation, unraveling as it unfolds; a meditation on the impossibility of pinning down the self when the self is always shifting. Its contradictions are intentional, its challenges purposeful. The prose veers between poetic abstraction and surreal narrative, balancing on the knife-edge between the cerebral and the grotesque, the comic and the tragic. Paisley’s style is intricate, labyrinthine, and often driven more by rhythm and sound than by conventional storytelling.
This is not a book for casual consumption; it demands full immersion, a willingness to be unmoored, and an appreciation for the absurd. At its heart, it wrestles with the fluidity of identity, the instability of memory, and the porous boundaries between reality and dream. The fingerprints of literary modernism are all over it, Rimbaud’s fractured self, Beckett’s black humor, Burroughs’ fevered hallucinations, all pulsing beneath its surface. For those drawn to the outer limits of language and thought, Paisley’s work is an intoxicating, disorienting plunge. Readers seeking conventional structure may find themselves adrift, but perhaps that is the point. This is not a book to be neatly understood; it is a book to be felt, wrestled with, and ultimately absorbed. A stunner.
Pub date January 3, 2025
Whiskey Tit
ISBN 978-1952600609
Price $18.00 (USD) Paperback
