'bone bite snare', (Erratum Press 2022), reviewed by Lee Beckworth

 

'Bone Bite Snare' the latest work from Michael McAloran that displays his skill at re-articulating language identity and meaning into a labyrinthine revolt against the demands of the word to be understood and in doing so he steps beyond the existence of the novel as bourgeois artefact /The vitality of his text underlines the possibility of a vertigo of linguistic masochism confronting the reader with the refusal of a fixed tyranny of predictable meaning while corrupting notions of authorial identity/it is the individual who creates art no longer art that creates the self conscious individual that supreme illusion where everything is resolved/this work reflects the darkness and drunkenness of an epoch of evil and pessimism/but he does not complain of being misunderstood/in fact he invites a delirium of mystery and ambiguity in this barren age of mediocrity/To quote Deleuze and Guattari the schizoid revolutionary pole of the unconscious follows the centrifugal movement of the desire to be liberated from all ideological positions/A form of neutrality that refuses to be nailed down to a narrative persona not modern not post modern but dominates the passion to have meaning revealed/ The rest is silence/What McAloran calls the paradigm of shit a bitter frenzy teethed to the sky/What is this text about?/What is it trying to achieve?/Perhaps these paragraphs are generated and operating under the guise of Freuds concept of displacement?/Why the plethora of micro description or rather perhaps the absence of a narrator of names of anything outside of his authorial abandonment of rules of literary conduct?/What is being described adrift through corridors of barren-toned abandon ?/Words exfoliates as a depth tide for extinction of centrality of rational discourse /Cybernetics as a language in its final transformation and bone bite snare defies the imagination to evolve a understanding of these word events unless the imagination perfects resonance with the art of confusion?/...till terse redempt nothing ever of the collision verge where coil of edge redeem spill of light/What does this mean for language?/There is a need for an ear tuned towards absorbing the maximum from the multiplicity of perspectives offered /...where to taste is of the dead light what once it will return bleak solace headlong broken../Meaning seems at first stripped from the lines of words that have no evidence of punctuation to stem the flow of images perhaps three dots being the only evidence of a pause in the onslaught of discourse/Mc Aloran as author is released from adherence to his humanity touching what is unimaginable forgotten unnecessary the displaced puzzle of the suspect narrative throws off habit and expresses a nascent state of verbal demiurgy/Will language in the Age of the post digital even use an alphabet as it is now/Will there be a flood of new words coming from a Cybernetic driven culture that dominates the paradigm of consciousness if such a state even exists/What being[s] might constitute the Cybernetic paradigm?/These are questions Mc Aloran engages with/ Consciousness is a consensual human hellucination/We are limited by our language/Just as Physics is limited by its theorems/The depth of the imagination is limited in the human/An awake dream a state of fugue drifting mindless and out of control/What happens when the author sheds his breathless haven of desire and thinks back until peeling shadows from wounds of memory coming to rest in paragraphs of confessional vapours to a silent audience?/The spoken word may disappear and all interaction between subjects may be purely desiring neural discharges/Micro seconds of pleasure but it [the gap] exists and is in no way linear/...bloody waste pass through given fleshed disaster rank with silences the final eyes of sleep forgotten merely to slumber long into ever echo where night is ever ever long/ With an ear bent towards absorbing the maximum from words linked in paragraphs meaning is stripped from the readers intolerable senses birthing the fleshed close of hour upon hour touching what is possibly unable to be known/The displaced puzzle of narrative throws off the habit of the quotidian and each phrase ends with a sense of finality then opens up into another series of subjective anomalies revealing fragments recognised from the plethora of interpretations hidden in the obfuscations of semiotic precision born of post biological thought processes/Mc Aloran is always transgressing the limit of comprehension hidden amongst the fragments between the words and the lines/...the words graze the surface dredge of corridors once forged die down in listless slaughter/ Semi automatic metaphors struggle to follow the maze of images/As the author says in another of his texts Code # 4 Texts the words must be read both horizontal and vertically with an urgent but sterile engagement/Again in bone bite snare through what dim a doorway unto abandoned landscapes all foreign/McAlorans post biological text reflects the deep contradictions in contemporary culture not by confronting it with a leftist academic ideology but with a sense of neutrality almost an anti aestheticism expressing conspiratorial language that demands the reader completely rethink its engagement with language communication a world akin to that of Beckett and Joyce/A text that attempts to liberate the conscious voice from the tyranny of pulp fiction and the overly common intellectual narratives/Mc Aloran restores the corporeality of desire to know to understand /Instead of the passive 16 seconds of focus a level of concentration is needed to grasp the reinventing of word and phoneme that generate new significations/The reader if astute enough finds themselves revelling in a state of jouissance/...null stop collision rat surfaces to forage breathe of cannot expel it is choke upon at silhouettes silent edge/

The systematic delirium of auto suggestion drives the reader to maximise the processes of the imagination/a rare glimpse into a reek of silence oblivious to the commerce here there or barren ashen sunk white knee deep in shit reek there was something what was it named after/The work aims to quench an urgent desire for simplicity and banality/The Forgotten Memory of the Future/Insanity and excess of vision and sound/ Consciousness is not the seat of identity/When you have gone as far as you can you are only half way there/Reality for Mc Aloran is not enough/He dreams of the inside which is the unconscious and the outside which is the imagination/What is the connection between the unconscious and the imagination between twins/Do we only imagine in the conscious or is it a direct production of the dream of the other that we have forgotten as real and think that it is an inspiration of the conscious?/Bone bite snare is a limit experience that prevents us from remaining in the dream without transgressing its emptied out presence/Or are we permanently in the dream becoming other within space and time a rational thought or a non-thought/the unconscious/Mc Aloran improvises with a brilliant acuity of mind/...waste ground where now the closure of what given to beckon of as if to speak all days done for haven/ How do we maintain the boundaries?/Should we bother?/The process of constructing identity is creative and the creative individual creates many selves/What do you dream of and what do you dream of becoming/Is a dream a process of desire or are desires limited to the conscious/Is the dream the thinking of the unthinkable/Mc Aloran constructs the almost unthinkable/He is recording the collapse of Western civilisation liquidating the last vestiges of his intrinsic or symbolic value while maintaining an absolute integrity of creative thought/broken shadows in a collective of meat to bone to tragedy lack of it turning upon where to of if not what silence...a flight from echo into foreign echoing desire ramparts a fist to pommel the skylines teeth...

Lee Beckworth 2022 

The book itself, which is the first part of a triptych published by Erratum Press, is available to purchase & also as a free download, here

2011

 

#9-

 

Sky vault

A meat hook’s echoing

Bled wind’s caress

Knock upon a gilded tide

Shimmer of breath

Steel shaft

Burnt black silences

Flesh/ collapse/ 

Sun exhaled

 

#10-

 

Ash

Bloody ash

Dread

Lapse unto

None

But spoken

Head or

Spiral rapture

Seethe

Spit of the sun’s emptiness

Dredge never to

Retrace

 

#11-

 

Assassin waste

Lapse until

Until foraging

 

(Shit of

The pulse’s echoing…)

 

#12-

 

Scar

Headless altar

At the foot of

Spasm

Walls of laughter 

Idle shadows following

Head of candied

Night

Skinned ashen

Pageantry

Of ghost limbs

 

#13-

 

Shroud

Cut cloud of winds

Emptily

Step without trace

Womb of skull

Bile

Bite the jugular

Fading hands of silent

Cull of

Spoken of

Nestle of a cadaver’s

Tune

Ice of night

Breathen to fall

 

#14-

 

Obliterated

The laughter of night

Death again

Again the laughterling

Spun web of

Arachnid emptiness

Dark all

Silence of broken glass

I shitting upon

I sweating the coldness

Of dead eyes

The rain cries out and

I feed upon

Breaking the bone breath

 

#15-

 

Snare biting at

The lung

Absence without

Colour

Hammer of split light

And the blood

Drained

The shadow emptied

Stripping the skin

Of light

Spasm of expelled

Breath

The hand emptied

Silenced

 

#16-

 

Syringe tears

At the edge of the

Sun’s jugular

Spitting out the dead

Teeth of hollowed

Purpose

Now and forever

Rasp of raw blush/ scythe

Body ablaze

Body of sand

=

now available: 'stun dark hollow' (Incunabula 2026)

 

'...no there what of it once never as what it yes or no cyclic as solace ever in what else of which given to recoil where once was haven of disclosure never of yet of where once all spoken no yet yes as bleed it all from severance severed to bone sharp reek all sung as if it were nothing of which zone of which whereof till closure entity meat to unspoken of redeemed till lapse what forage weight of eye where breath once of whereof silence allwhile drag weight what of echo-echo what of what now in of where to be is to where none abounds parameter distance is shit in one’s shoes drag of it all have it all at a loss suffocate of entity breathless a room’s lack taste where in of which where eye is of forsaken all spoken for/ as of which/ breakage subtlety of/ for how

 silence of expel of intake of night it to elapse where to once what of elect to din of soundless echo echo nullity blank space tone dead lapse of eye until whereby of fallen shadow long vacant ever of closure of some nothing ever there in an absence of/ where to recoil breakage no what term of dislodge collapse shudder shatter wordless soundless broken never answer tidal atrophic lapse it of what long & all what sung from derelict absolve lack of intake desire for once that never other ever than obsolete devour colourless in laughter of which a collision bathe in black waters closed shores where flesh abides all fallen forage no all forage fallen nothing to remark upon lapse all to having in dread of hour upspoke forgotten of in of else some distance none...'

a collaboration of text & image between DM Mitchell & I, available here

from 'vault', (2010), reissued 2026, (Incunabula)

 

smear-

rat’s tooth

bone kiss

sea of marrow

sea of flesh

a blackened sky through

which the carnival rides

a bleached moon

salve of no purpose

a retort

scraped from the banquet

of the skull

in my dreaming I die

meat dissolving in frozen light

the blade bites deep

strikes vein

kiss of the skyline

words retract into flesh erased by

the depths of the void

bone tooth

sea of rats

kiss of marrow

sea of flesh

in my dreaming my death-stripped flesh

burning to ashes

a black vault opens

the eyes roll back

a taste of blood

a smear

of electric light

assassin-

the winds have

 absolved

the assassin

walls

breaking from the

corners of

the finality of the sky

churned flesh gutters like

a final flame

the teeth rip the skull to

shredded laughter

the meat of the impoverished

tongue wilts in the

after-birth

of desire’s quarry

the nothingness of listless stone

whispers

the breath expired escapes

like a whipped canine

the assassin walls shed frugal tears

the cracked skin of nothing ever

splits beneath the veils

wordless smiles devoured traced by the

skin of the dark

the cold weight etched

void of elixirate

of purity

the Shadow breathes in endlessly

burning grating flesh

at the edge of the abyss

the true laughter of denuded ice

words the eviscerations that

the silence feeds upon

as the silence

erases

grave-digger-

obliterated sun

a jugular bled

beneath the shadow

of night’s sky

a bulb of laugher

birthing

in the

delight of death

the breath is night also

a harlequin desire

in a gilded locked cage

the sequins of the winds drag

the entrails

from the blood-streaked dark

a collision of bone the charity laid to waste

in a labyrinth of laughter

the fingers trace the edge of the blade

skull of exhumed particles of rotting blood-

soaked sands

laid to rest in the death of X.

(X. reeks of filth in the silent amber of

The artificial light)

a shattered window of existence fades out

the embalming night endless peels from the earth...

a smear of the grave-digger

vibrating

in violent coloured smiles

vibrating

in violent coloured smiles

draped shroud of atrophic wasted funereal tears.

available here

=

now available - 'vault', Incunabula 2026

 

here

Some pieces from 'all shadow sung' - Incunabula Media 2026

originally published under the title 'the elsewhere none', in Var(2x) 

also from 'all shadow sung'

from 'all shadow sung' @ Var(2x)

 

Here: Var(2x): Michael Mc Aloran, all shadow sung

You can find the book, here

'in circling light' - Incunabula Media

 

'in circling light', a new collaborative work by DM Mitchell & Michael McAloran

Incunabula Media