Monday 18 March 2024

From 'the worse/ the better done'/ DM Mitchell & Michael Mc Aloran/ Incunabula Media 2023

 







From 'the worse/ the better done', the second collaboration of image & text by DM MItchell & Michael Mc Aloran, published 2023 by Incunabula Media & available here






Sunday 17 March 2024

Saturday 16 March 2024

Some sample pieces from 'at the edge of pulse'/ (Incunabula Media 2023)

 


Available from Incunabula Media:
'A liturgy of absence, a paean to desolation. Shorn of sentiment and vain aspirations, it's as if the words on the page are a testament to vanished humanity, left behind when everything else has eroded and gone...'
"in stray exile of presence child's a-blind in silhouette discern what speech(less) burns in bait of fragment's resolve/ detracts unto edge in desolate brim of shiv till buckled bone arrestation of blood spray upon wild skins once known of null of butcher here or there ever after of in collision breath(e) eclipse of once was severed nothing of the known till once unto a shatter of all pulse resolve"
Buy it here

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1.

dense what night a shaft of blood recorded ever of
shadowy expound of silence breath exposed

windows of thick heat a desolate
a sudden nothing of to touch

wry bones to taste
entity lapse of

nothing the devour of a pestle & mortar smile
cracked jagged broke static emblems

foreign as was dawn
spitting out the shed skin

of seeds what blind
what soured

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6.

castrato sunsets of the beached flowering of bloody sands
& the blood of tide

butchering all that can be observed neither seen
it-of in it dream
pulse white

shadows that beg
for blood

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27.

skin-rip of circus wheel a jagged worship of never having
spin lapse of callused fingers adrift

echo-breath/e of excise nothing of the fortitude
nor the exist of rapture colourings

sudden closed flesh of scarlet weighted nothing of
all haven butchered the tongue dead fed to

the dogs of speech
disarmed a silence of the a-bask of that singular

setting
cold eyes burning

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31.

needless to
of the orchid once
spitting into callous attribute

all scars brought to light by the asking of the skyline
of the once edge butchered meat
& the sew thy breath
beneath the sun's
bloodline
reduced
to be

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Saturday 24 February 2024

'[unspoken]', (Incunabula Media 2024), reviewed by JG

 


‘[unspoken]’ drags the reader–wary or not, no difference–through pathless scapes of abandoned rooms and ruptured anatomies, through dead light and undead words. Though in appearance this text seems to be a patchwork of prose-poetic fragments and dramaturgical scraps, literary form is, as ever, a formality at best for Mc Aloran and, more often, even less than that. The relentless flux of decaying bodies and dubious voices stares between the pages’ blank spaces as if they were hemorrhaged eyes gazing through Ed Gein’s dead skin-masks: to further the already-great distance always separating the idiotic pageant of Appearance and whatever assumptions one would like to make of the impersonal, ineffable “real.”

Still, there is always plenty of room for “hyenic laughter”–that somatic signification of a communication-limit having been reached–and the voices which appear more frequently in the book’s latter half provide occasions for such laughter. These voices, even though presumably disembodied, stutter and stumble just as much as if their breath were still mounted in meat. The dialogue in itself, of course, amounts to nothing, so much so that its presentation as a “play” might remind one of an intentionally bad puppet-show in which it almost seems as if these fragments of voices were sheer babble echoing from the depths of some ontic asylum (far from that word’s etymological sense of “refuge”). And the parrying among the disembodied voices moves along with such anguish and futility, leavened with glimpses of meta-mockery, as to suggest that the inadequacy of language has always been at least as much a problem of consciousness as it is of mere anatomy. And should a return of the voice to the body be possible after such severe displacement, it bears the cruel gift of “ventriloquist illuminations…”.

As it seems Mc Aloran has been finding new ways to alienate the “I” via language in his other, more recent books, this text is no exception. Whenever that battered pronoun appears, it is always, according to traditional grammar, verbally mismatched: “‘I’ asks, breaking through the teeth of sudden disavowal…”. The pronoun and verb is in as much disagreement as all of the miserable traces of beings spreading throughout this text appear to harshly disagree with the illusory, though no less onerous, business of selfhood. And, of course, Mc Aloran sometimes states the matter as frankly as anyone could: “‘I’ is a dour cunt…fluctuating…obsolete, an assault…”; “I” could just as well be “it” for how much of subjective experience remains unspoken and, most likely, unspeakable.

This is yet another example of a feverishly-active poet who is thoroughly unwilling to let the reader rest on the well-cushioned though long since-abscessed assumptions regarding meaning, language and selfhood; a perhaps not-so-generally-welcome alternative to whatever trifles any given laureate might be writing any given moment…


Part of a short volume of two dramatic pieces, available here


Saturday 17 February 2024

'ever unto' - Incunabula Media - (2023 edition)

 


'McAloran's writing always seems to me to be the result of a process of 'removal' more than construction - like patterns left in stone by natural erosion, or almost like words left on an advertising board once the weather and time have done their worst with it. Although lacking in emotion, I find them incredibly beautiful and moving. Skirting the borderline between polemic and asemic, signal and noise, reading McAloran's writing is like taking a trip into the heart of a dead star.'- DM Mitchell.
You can find this book here

Friday 15 December 2023

'at the edge of pulse', available from Incunabula Media

 


Now available from Incunabula Media:
'A liturgy of absence, a paean to desolation. Shorn of sentiment and vain aspirations, it's as if the words on the page are a testament to vanished humanity, left behind when everything else has eroded and gone...'
"in stray exile of presence child's a-blind in silhouette discern what speech(less) burns in bait of fragment's resolve/ detracts unto edge in desolate brim of shiv till buckled bone arrestation of blood spray upon wild skins once known of null of butcher here or there ever after of in collision breath(e) eclipse of once was severed nothing of the known till once unto a shatter of all pulse resolve"


Sunday 2 July 2023

Monday 5 June 2023

Now available: 'scenes from nowhere', Incunabula Media 2023

 


"In ‘scenes from nowhere’, written in 2011, we see the foundation of McAloran’s oeuvre beginning to take shape . “This old hulk of bone, meat, this rind... [will] fool the absence into thinking there was ever anything” is a recurring theme through his work, anything, that is, except language to insist on the despair of there never being anything. Beckett-like he says “the growing is the dying”, the world is a “trunk full of rats”, an “abattoir where beasts hang with their throats cut...” ‘scenes’ , however, unlike McAloran’s later works, and despite, or maybe because of his despair with the corporeal, does take a narrative turn, albeit, as one would expect, towards the dark side. The turn, namely centres round his finding a young woman, badly beaten by professional hookers whose patch she’d strayed onto, late one night, lying on the street. He carries her to his room, where he cares for her with a bath and whiskey. His claim “I’ll go on with it, without purpose”, is undermined when duty insists on caring for a fellow human, which he does with purpose, maybe love. ‘scenes’ is an ideal introduction to McAloran’s work. It contradicts his hopelessness in existence, where “dreams are for lesser men”, through his intuitive will to care that is narrated in a moving and compelling passage of the work that may surprise his followers. ‘scenes’ is necessary reading for those who want an introduction to his later works, and for those who have read them but need to know of their genesis."

Dr. Arthur Broomfield.

Available from Incunabula Media

Monday 13 February 2023

'ghostmeat', Incunabula Media, 2023

 



NOW AVAILABLE via Incunabula Media
'...images of absence, eroded texts, the memory of desire,
no longer even the reproduction of our alienation, but the reproduction of a reproduction,
phantoms plucked from the dreaming pool of a machine,
words left behind by the receding tide of collapsed culture...'

'swarm black lights', Oneiros Books, 2023

 


'SWARM BLACK LIGHTS' my collection of gnomic, experimental prose poetics & abstract paintings:
'...swarm stasis eclipse terse knock(ed) from shadow-limb coil of wrung blood black secretion tension wild eye shatter of glasswork(s) closest of extension nothing bearing less than down what of till silence traces obsidian liquid night long edge of fathom closure voiceless…
…tied tongue wrestling shade upon echo film surface coat black blood & shining certain as if once emblem cold colours distance lock night(less breath)e) taken from extension riddled to fit from fitful cast from flesh char edge nothing as before all called once more exposure swarm black light(s)…
…echo-black once swallowed as if to collect the curse drain light butchers syllabic with gilt of trace of hand restoration ever-claim secretion emblems aftermath sudden less than cold distance ever-once coil of curled tongue a drapery of light to flow in silenced rooms surface tension(s)…
…flay slash what mark what watermark of closed abandon effortlessly benign cut to the marrow’s eye till breadth of wing sing sung bitten broke stone meat wrench of nothing ever closed/ syllabic as once was in echo lapse intone spit black rejectile detrimentarium exhale reclaim ever clearer…'
Available via here: Oneiros Books


Monday 5 December 2022

from 'paralysis gestures'/ Oneiros Books 2022

 


"Michael Mc Aloran's words are a miserable requiescats of the flesh, creating a gravitational laceration in the dark. The betrayed open system of flesh ridicules the erosion of the soul and just keeps cursing the twist of gravity."

Kenji Siratori



...scarred without longing/ there’ll be the stasis of it the hearse of the ever-laughter spun lest from out of darkened/ choke/ dead space and an empty pageant’s shadow…


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…sick try for the waken. call cards no flowering sight. stay ashore. breathe pageant mock sun light froze closure eye. all still what lessen echo. sky-fold origami azure. (repeat)...


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...rock back forth neither gesture silent hands all foreign. abort free lock hold bespeech climb no vertebrae silence will what no do. penchant forget. ask it pane it. no sound just as be should. belive. believe. cannot recollect of how or what for either matters/ no...


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...till live take up thy bones & rot as circus growth indigenous colours bland faith accord. nothing of the matter of asphyxiate cold shoulder treble tremor sky alone blessed what till mark take up thy live thy ocular concede...


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...turning towards where the fragrance lies there is no torrent of applause in the intrinsic silence burn desire of (-ing-) burn of in all sanguine repertoire irrepair collective fine line given drunk close door forget foreshadow longing laughter. ever-breakage...


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...as too soon the door ajar & the jaded shadow shed left behind as if to breathe of it were to of in an elixir of vanquished the night no further step once two/ step not once...


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Now available from ONEIROS BOOKS

From 'the worse/ the better done'/ DM Mitchell & Michael Mc Aloran/ Incunabula Media 2023

  From 'the worse/ the better done', the second collaboration of image & text by DM MItchell & Michael Mc Aloran, published ...