'retrocede', now available from Erratum Press

 

…retrocede is a series of experimental texts written in varying, disembodied vocal styles. Meaning is not absolute. There are no characters, there is no plot, nor is it indeed a novel in any conventional sense. The context is the written now. There are traces & meditations on perspective and language, voice & nothingness; the corporeal and the ‘raw teeth of extinction’. The book takes its origins from a burgeoning sense of exile, & futility; violence has its place in the linguistics of the texts, the imagery… (made to rust, in the burning non-chambers of the ideational, taken as was once from the emptily of dispel, as dreaming a broken history to the point of non-exist, in a present/presence continuum, ever as of the once knowing little of the what of as of all… a sickly strain of diseased language rotting its innards out from the echo within the echo, the coil with each form that sanguine gives its traces…)

///

“A nihilistic experience. As if flies enter the mouth, the room, the rotation of thought—what reality or whose? Lynch’s Mulholland Drive-dumpster-monster-scene meets paint splatter and methodical prose. Mc Aloran’s writing tackles modernism’s complex legacy in Joyce’s wake—one hundred years on. At the inscrutable core, that inner contingency: what do we name the sap, the nectar, the marrow? Retrograde, without agenda, Mc Aloran points with obsolescence to obsolescence… retrocede's metaphysical alteration of linear patterns carry the reader through chaotic undulations. Language is dispossessed, Shakespearian, confrontational. Yet as bedlam congeals, we find harmony itself is an inescapable shadow.” -- Maureen Alsop

“It’s difficult to situate the work of Michael Mc Aloran in literary terms. It’s easier to describe it in terms of what it bears little or no resemblance to (most prose and poetry). It’s also a mistake to look for things it does resemble (he’s been blessed and cursed by comparisons to Samuel Beckett – a comparison made chiefly, I suspect, because they’re both Irish). // ‘retrocede’ does have a narrative, but one devoid of time and/or space. Almost like a still-life where objects frozen in amniotic abandon are subject to an almost autistic focus and obsession, within totemic self-referential landscapes reminiscent of the early paintings by Tanguy and Masson. // Although time and/or space are absent, the element of ‘conscience’ is not. Objects and actions display a lugubrious abjection, landscapes shimmer with disgust or disappointment, a lightning flash is shameful, a miasma of resignation suffuses the pages. We feel instinctively familiar with this world, as if it’s something we’ve been carrying with us deep on some level of the reptilian brain. // I frequently find refuge in Mc Aloran’s writing; devoid equally of anxiety and hope, like a ground zero point in a maelstrom of increasingly meaningless information.” -- DM Mitchell

'retrocede' is available from Erratum Press

from 'longshadowfall'/ (Editions du Cygne 2017)/ analysis - Aad de Gids - 2016

…ends as it does not wish to have ever had/ commence then out or not what matter/ dries eyed spurious metals a vibrant bloody welt/ asking of some none till follow long shadow fallen/ it says yet lacks all sound/ rent flesh in scum divisive edge guttered night abort of fragrant none of it about/ or else what else not a trace to be seem/ strips bare nothing no no matter if/ in-lacerate of be damned dried blood nothing drag of irrepent dragging the spinal affluence some solace climb to dream of exigent given to taste/ what wind/ make it nothing less than brutal not/ scarce rot/ drag of lights permeating skin in a drift pierce as one locks baited silence hovering in within not taken for less or more taste of saturate attrition/ bedamned/ lock in/ vibrating what stone said yes/ eye abacus/ brute flesh carving out into endless night what matter/ absence of/ strips shut down/ collision purpose scattered remnants nothing of/ till bite what ask/ prayers from depth departed sunk dead sudden/ collapse unto thine ashes/ a lung/ fibrous oxidate climbing transparent space elective drain what stun lack trace abortive none of lack displaced/ in seek of sun lights broken valves of having traced through laughter long given to expire/ skeletal/ traceless of eye what matter closed fingers fist shattered glass impenetrable sudden reject of/ biting down upon bared knuckles echo-echo traceless acclimatized/ there has been/ nothing crimson pace trace alongside/ till vacant light traces some accord what spasm senseless sense/ trace of non-percept/ glimmers deep/ in deep/ what well of liquid night of endless blood/ in-dream spits shards of glass into/ fissure semblant what/ it asks what spun colourless demise/ as if to say in murmur desert hyenic minced no solace it/ cold close till return laughter traceless from some black origin unfounded/ lapse climb reductive/ speaks of dead cold harrow priceless/ aches just a/ not one/ forgotten dream pageant nothing no it closure/ as if to say that in/ closure fist not a mark to remain/ settles to fall/ peels away skinned lights broken aspirate not a trace of/ broke stone laugh there is/ expels breaths as of shit/ bile vomit no breath for tomorrow/ (I/ eye laughterling)/ conjoined silences/ devouring words what frenzy to become…

 '...an abstract questioning surplus yet above sheer materialism, astrophysics: "a vibrant bloody welt" holds as well the lament over an indignation as the has-been pulsatory bloodflow and vascularity leasioned in the thousand aortal ruptures this, as a "Je Accuse !" either or as a veto to hyperamassed materiality and antropocene in centennia contingently hybridised "grown" sidewaystructures in which distilleries, intricate chemical plants and chaotisized traffic congestion pretzels our remnants still dwell, of which state Michael writes the script exactly, en pointe, his metahackerism on this condition of metatime or, metatimelessness. "rent flesh in scum divisive edge guttered night abort of fragrant none of it about", these, dense acribic almost post adorno-wittgensteinian formulae to dedemonise what the hell is going on this, then also double: (Nietzsche: still kicking what is falling) kicking it further and texting it. herewith it becomes "encyclopaedia of world": a weld between poetry and philosophy and the argot which suits best, argot du jour. the schizoid crumbled, disirectionally mirrored state of our psychotic sociuses: "in-lacerate of be damned dried blood nothing drag of irrepent dragging the spinal affluence some solace climb to dream of exigent given to taste". a veritable syndromology of the locked-in status, generalised, unpsychological more, fragmented irrepresentational as then, in casu, in this new tight text form in unruly density and uncomfortable acuitry: "drag of lights permeating skin in a drift pierce as one locks baited silence hovering in within not taken for less or more taste of saturate attrition/ bedamned/ lock in". "till bite what ask" the only instrumentality and modes of machinistics such incisive predatory postempathy interviews done in fields, to fields of, what the hell happened the snake bite still ressort of figments of interrogation the bleak weather mere involuntary illustration of what probably never was. "in seek of sun lights broken valves of having traced through laughter long given to expire/ skeletal" laughter from now on: mock laughter the world an anti-theatre of public as actors. "biting down upon bared knuckles echo-echo traceless acclimatized" acclimatisation, more gratuite and combustive as to ever serve any improvement or "progression": in/gressions we have here and, in-Sects, ISIS CIA LSD in an inextricable concoction of the "liberia-model" brasilianising wildly around the globe. "till vacant light traces some accord what spasm senseless sense/ trace of non-percept/ glimmers deep/ in deep/ what well of liquid night of endless blood/ in-dream spits shards of glass into" this, as unintentional as accidental yet chillingly astute and granite sensitivist "diagnosis" of whichever "it is regardless of what". "bile vomit no breath for tomorrow/ (I/ eye laughterling)/ conjoined silences/ devouring words what frenzy to become…" futureless humanity or future without antropocene of the remnants of which these are the laments to be found on the empty steppes, headily fixtured with hi-industrial ghost apparitions.'

[all citations in italics]

[AdG]

'final fragments', now available from Incunabula Media

 

https://incunabulamedia.com/poethicks

'final fragments' - a novella, (2011), revised & reissued in 2024 by Incunabula Media... Cover artwork by me & design by DM Mitchell

'all what spoke(n)', now available from Incunabula Media

 

https://incunabulamedia.com/poethicks

'all what spoke(n)' - a collection of miniature experimental novellas.

"...content, meaning, intent, semantics, linguistic characteristics, repetitionism, omittances, meant misspellings or uneven metaphor or whatever the fuck needed to distress a traditionalist poetology, it is all stuck upon this coral reef of lexicologic forms or deformations with partially contours."

from the introduction by Aad de Gids...

Many thanks to editor DM Mitchell for his work on this

Forthcoming - 'retrocede' - Erratum Press - November 5th 2024

 

…retrocede is a series of experimental texts written in varying, disembodied vocal styles. Meaning is not absolute. There are no characters, there is no plot, nor is it indeed a novel in any conventional sense. The context is the written now. There are traces & meditations on perspective and language, voice & nothingness; the corporeal and the ‘raw teeth of extinction’. The book takes its origins from a burgeoning sense of exile, & futility; violence has its place in the linguistics of the texts, the imagery… (made to rust, in the burning non-chambers of the ideational, taken as was once from the emptily of dispel, as dreaming a broken history to the point of non-exist, in a present/presence continuum, ever as of the once knowing little of the what of as of all… a sickly strain of diseased language rotting its innards out from the echo within the echo, the coil with each form that sanguine gives its traces…)

///

“A nihilistic experience. As if flies enter the mouth, the room, the rotation of thought—what reality or whose? Lynch’s Mulholland Drive-dumpster-monster-scene meets paint splatter and methodical prose. Mc Aloran’s writing tackles modernism’s complex legacy in Joyce’s wake—one hundred years on. At the inscrutable core, that inner contingency: what do we name the sap, the nectar, the marrow? Retrograde, without agenda, Mc Aloran points with obsolescence to obsolescence… retrocede's metaphysical alteration of linear patterns carry the reader through chaotic undulations. Language is dispossessed, Shakespearian, confrontational. Yet as bedlam congeals, we find harmony itself is an inescapable shadow.” -- Maureen Alsop

“It’s difficult to situate the work of Michael Mc Aloran in literary terms. It’s easier to describe it in terms of what it bears little or no resemblance to (most prose and poetry). It’s also a mistake to look for things it does resemble (he’s been blessed and cursed by comparisons to Samuel Beckett – a comparison made chiefly, I suspect, because they’re both Irish). // ‘retrocede’ does have a narrative, but one devoid of time and/or space. Almost like a still-life where objects frozen in amniotic abandon are subject to an almost autistic focus and obsession, within totemic self-referential landscapes reminiscent of the early paintings by Tanguy and Masson. // Although time and/or space are absent, the element of ‘conscience’ is not. Objects and actions display a lugubrious abjection, landscapes shimmer with disgust or disappointment, a lightning flash is shameful, a miasma of resignation suffuses the pages. We feel instinctively familiar with this world, as if it’s something we’ve been carrying with us deep on some level of the reptilian brain. // I frequently find refuge in Mc Aloran’s writing; devoid equally of anxiety and hope, like a ground zero point in a maelstrom of increasingly meaningless information.” -- DM Mitchell

Meanwhile, you can find my other Erratum Press title, here

A new trilogy of text & image by DM Mitchell & Michael Mc Aloran/ 2024

 

The books, which are experiments in text & image are available via Incunabula Media 

3 poems from 'dredge echo din'/ Incunubula Media 2024

 

=

known

what spoke

till drift

blood turn closure ask

it turn

out from which

closer still

dead shadows of where excavation

desire of where

nothing

to be

=

crack of breath eager to expel the light

of burn it-closure no

nothing amber lock walled workage bone

reclusion edge

from pit till cleanse

dream in of next of weight reduct

at echo's edge

turn of what closure tongue

coil of the within coil

adrift in cognisant

breakage

lacerate of sound expose

till the bit of lock it-turn

ever of till

nothing of the ever what

before

=

as dream till known where the edge of follow

till cut of flesh take from drift

it-lapse

shadowplay

till foreign absenteeism claim of which

nothing of the ask of it

froze what tongue till broke

echo-din

silence recollection

as were once

where once

fallen forage night

asked of in the

end

which has never once

begun

=

'dredge echo din', my short, new collection of poems, which also contains images by DM Mitchell, is now available via the link below:

https://incunabulamedia.com/poethicks

Minotaur Ballet - Swansea Surreal - 2024

 

A multimedia extravaganza to be held in the Volcano Gallery, Swansea, October 2024...

To mark the 100th anniversary of the First Surrealist Manifesto, Swansea will host a three-week exhibition of contemporary Surrealist art at Volcano Theatre and Gallery, High Street this autumn.

The exhibition, titled Minotaur Ballet – Swansea Surreal, will feature mainly Welsh artists, most of them from Swansea, alongside guests from Australia, Ukraine, Romania, Czech Republic, Egypt, Ireland and other parts of the UK.

-David Greenslade

New cover art for 'obsidian flowers/ (selected writings 2010 - 2020)' / Oneiros Books

 

Now available, with a new skin, 'obsidian flowers', which is a collection of excerpts from 10 years worth of work, published by various publishers, & available via the Oneiros Books' page at Incunabula Media. The book also contains an introduction by Dr. Arthur Broomfield & was designed & edited by DM Mitchell...

https://incunabulamedia.com/michael-mcaloran

The introduction by Lee Beckworth to 'in dim forgotte(n)'/ Incunabula Media

 

Negtropics of Imaginary Cruising/

A genealogy of flows of intensity In Dim Forgotte[n] by Michael Mc Aloran

Michael Mc Aloran/s latest text has discovered and excavated a landscape of interminable desire/of excessive imaginary fields/a place where no reader has been and certainly no writer has documented before/this figural dimension/with such subversive textual skill and discipline as Mc Aloran/ Contemporary existential ideology tells the subject to pay attention and take control of their life to learn from the past and look to the future with its sprawling information freeways of algorithmic meaning/Mc Aloran defies this process with a work that defines a future without implicit meaning or narrative direction organising his world to his advantage with a style[less] fucking with the systems of written exchanges/ overwhelming the classical notions of univocal truth and eternal essences as limits on discourse/It is difficult to write about his work because many of the words and metaphors needed to do so haven/t been invented yet/He has revolutionised and re-inscribed what combinations of words and their potential meanings can be defined as to one beyond more than that of current/unchanging/ cognitive limits/that tedious repertory of reified transcendent values posturing as the “text”/always in a state of maintaining privileged signifiers and narrative reliability/ downtown emptiness and elegant inanity/]In Dim Forgotte[n] Mc Aloran shoulders the burden of representation and re-creates a form of literary innovation that seems in its brevity to leave out more than it retains while actually immersing the reader in a proliferation of possible meanings/Unfolding fragments in one voice and then the next and the next without resorting to the banality of a central character or aspiring to traditions of social realism or heroic post mondernism/Mc Aloran evades isms imaginary cruising around dissonant violence and breaking through boundaries and stoppages each paragraph shifts desires and social fluxes constantly producing and creating appropriating coagulated with the endless flux of other desiring machines/all the codes are floating in a opaque miasma of birth pangs of breaking down and reforming perceptions/For those whose reading has been polluted by the codex engaging with this text is all the more difficult/He puts his work in a place where he is not identified as the the primary generator of the text as errant/erratic/multi faceted author creating order out of what appears at first as mind blowing disorder/locating literature as the site of a new aesthetic struggle started by the likes of Samuel Beckett/James Joyce and William Burroughs/There is no longer a cosmos of rigid reductive fictional forms/the algorithm of formulaic dogma is confronted with a vigorous defiance/meaning originates in the imagination of the reader as an epiphany of discovery/all interpretive logic can only focus on structures and systems both analogue and digital/coding and totalizing operations of thought/......sudden from artefact razor fingers trace the asylum tears of what bled till next...words burn as of shit in wax paper where to rat is to nothing ever closure lung a neck snapped in the silent darkness of tidal oceanic...The text is an instantiation of the metaphysics of shock sentences which at the start are limited to a few words but which grow to lengthy passages replete with the primal waters of the life of each word in itself in its own world and as part of a state of apprehension Avital Ronel explores in her seminal book Finitudes Score/The reader must prepare for what they might become after reading and absorbing this nomadic/highly successful attempt to redefine the future task of both reading writing and understanding not yet conjugated/there are no prohibitions in this world and meaning is dependent on the contingent and the aleatory combination of the fractured corpse of humanity bloody and deranged and the ghostly presence of the unheimlichkeit /One must prepare for alterity/......waste attrition it all of less than ever breaks forth to collect of banquet skull teaming with nectar toothless toothed whore of broke jaw emptiness where spe/cial is to outstretch rhythm all sunk devour as of where belittle...blood is out of focus nocturne of drought/The work de-totalises words as signs with a set of significations that a community has agreed upon and usurps this process with the absolute reign of his own impersonal unique ideology/One not engaged with by the usual academic definitions and critiques/Not locked in a disjunctive synthesis/Sliding past all expectations of homogeneous mannerisms refusing a identificatory presence using brute force and blunt instrument quotidian intentions that of detourning producing a work that is antagonistic or antithetical to all previous texts/cracking open textual integrity and that of bringing to an end the cult of literal suicide unchosen and unspoken systems of word/sign equivalences with their ontological manifestations and implications//A torrent of data tracers illuminates the void of surgical precision of random individuality the reader takes on the task of a forensic team drifting to low resolution velocity disarmed as literary terrorist suspect slow wave of neural passes through the reader arrested by flux of images rogue spelling and [lack of] punctuation/there are few pronouns just a couple of [you] and one or two [their] the subject being is apparently eviscerated self mutilating corpse of the child [not at the centre which remains occupied by the word] under orders to ...strip meat from memory fresh meat...human waste bailing out these are the damned nothing of the sky to bite...all of in said of to reveal...razor splinters swallowed down...transparency flung to the dogs... as child dissolves the umbilical cord attaching it to ...snare bone bite havoc [of] close ...spasm of dredge of fist of some breakage point given to occlude dead haven of scatter words to barren fields where nothing ever ever marrow silence of accord/as drift shrift shift of sequence collide with sky bare meat hoping it can re-attach itself to dismembered words the migraine images of autopsy defuse into traumatic memory protocols of psycho surgery...mocks dawn’s collective absence of feel drags dead child bones through avenues of broken glass of scatter of rusty nails of cum of shit of blood of cascade of flesh to redeem in existentia.../ A new form of communicating using the cybernetics of rhizomic connections creating a text of improvisations on states of decay disorder and dismemberment of the very structure of the processes of cerebral thought/...self engaged night spots of the forever lost there never should have been no [thing] but word-less asked of yet never once asked for...Antonioni/s Zabriskie Point the exploding refrigerator of words disengaged from the power circuits of psycho sexual perversity/Meaning comes directly from inspiration through a maze of subversively threaded visions at first in single words slightly out of focus then clusters of words rush into view and finally paragraphs a new vocabulary of thought allowing for freedom of creation and fluidity of punctuation the reader is free to improvise and take themselves to places they never imagined existed...in labyrinth of bleak discord where shards are emblems of desire in ebb & flow of signature of meld through passage breathe where to/...fuck all sediment scatter words to barren fields...one of the many pools of lucidity that litter the text/The reader is sent to zones of occupation subjected to indefinite cruel and unusual containment under statutes pertaining to states of high mental Alert and Hysteria tortured relentlessly with heavy mental collision of word noise contamination ...denizen of excrement subtle as devour throughout where to exit from is to/ cannot exit...from as if to/ sound to fall to beg of it/ dead tide...electro-shock-therapy softening up for ambiguous interrogation by cerebral apparatus or extraction of fundamentalist genome by open brain surgery/Responses are expected and diplomatic immunity which gives respite is dead/...dog shit in the streets cannot wipe away the traces/ long turning of the breathe of it it clings to nasal/eye/ wipes away the reek it cannot/ nor ever/ aspire to it or ever lack of it...Every thing used to have its limit even the truth of Burroughs cutups sorrow death betrayal including desire for alphabetical entertainment/Mc Aloran takes the written word onto a higher platform maintaining an elegance of form and integrity of the chance for cognitive plenitude for the reader to engage with a plethora of floating signifiers/With post-human prosthetic servo word mechanism resentful perspective under immanence of deep and uneven phallic word-wars monitor self control codes blur/fluctuate/re-form .....as little by little child reveals burns in sands of night’s cavalcades where to drought is to of collision of dead waste speech fragrant as nothing ever was before cold ivory dice cast unto...../ Such passages are seeped in a deadly negtropics of melancholia and despair the words assert their strident meaning operating just below the surface of understanding yet anarchic enough to leave a critical impact on the reader/Creating a new way of writing and reading which alters the readers sense of an affinity with the sombre emotional aspects of conservative human nature/This book takes a crucial step invoking such primal emotions as fear/anxiety/dread and finally despair/Creating a sense of contemplation of a text that refuses to give up its meaning even after a second or third reading/It is a labor intensive activity/give it time to reveal itself reminding us of the human touch of genius/The words engulf the reader with a very complex structure of language stripping words back to a raw vital power avoiding the disease of our Age: that of Intertexuality/Mc Aloran inherits the powers of life and death the torso without limbs unsewn raised on dust veins full of oil the spectre of Phallic autonomy is a manipulated social conspiracy engaging with the paranoid and the skitzoid the artifice of intelligence grasps its own manufactured essences again/Mc Alorans work evades the urge to interpret corrupt reality transposing the work into a commentary which hopes to reveal many hidden meanings while at the same time offering nothing/in all its truth a decadent practice to say the least/Mc Aloran has widened the gap between literature and criticism and evades the arrogance that critics bring with their rigid attempts to snare the text within the limits of their own facile ideological aesthetics/The discomforting features of in dim forgotte[n] begin with the title and continue through to the last paragraphs.......silence then that cannot/ blood-stain upon skin/ turns the face aside a kiss of slaughterhouse/ strips denuded the carrion of vocal/ it all fall down/ time what of it to turn to utter waste/ irredeem of speechless/ speechless tones fades vibratory blood/ as it gathers as it set to light to burn down ever of to unbecome/ fade yes or no yes or no/ it echos... in the empty head oscillating between repulsion and attraction but never boredom/

The book itself is available here

'in dim forgotte(n)' blurb by Andrew C. Wenaus

 Like the dissipating flickers of photons and last snaps of neutrinos as the cosmos slouches towards the silence of maximum entropy, McAloran’s periodic utterances—like an abandoned number station sending signals into the ether—proceed with their directionless promenade towards absolute diffusion. With each reiterative instance of thwarted recollection, these utterances offer a meditation on a past as if it were so distant that its revelations become abstract to the point of null, all while the site of recollection in the present remains eminently alone, patiently waiting the culmination of a torturously elongated finitude. So, in dim forgotte(n) collapses this cosmic isolation into the very intimate site of memory in an ever diffuse present. By introducing this matrix of utterances stripped of their semiotic glue, McAloran writes where the sterile and silent ellipses the word and offers a glimpse beyond language into the soundless stasis of extra-linguistic occultation.

-Andrew C. Wenaus, author of The Literature of Exclusion: Dada, Data, and the Threshold of Electronic Literature

The book itself is available here

'cold ash redeem'/ DM Mitchell & Michael Mc Aloran/ Incunabula Media 2023

 

the third part of the informal trilogy between DM Mitchell & Michael Mc Aloran, available here

...it says that no such utter thing should no not ever be in once thrice to begin as if to close of hour where flux of light were barbed nothing less/as was speaken yes than blossom drift of shadow(ed) light dissolve a syllabus a nothing more/as shadowed says thrice close of open hour ever should no be it trace open out of all to echo in of closure in upon what matter/as wry of eye/it blood it be to seal wound white again solace again nothing again/silence again...

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

from 'ghostmeat'/ DM Mitchell & Michael Mc Aloran/ Incunabula 2023

 

'ghostmeat', the first book of a collaborative trilogy with words by Michael Mc Aloran & images by DM Mitchell, is available from Incunabula Media

'[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