Bücher veröffentlicht von Equus Press

Desert Tiles brings a fresh spin on the "Corraoesque" theme of text / image coming "alive", becoming a "semiotic organism," undertaken here via the twin metaphors of text as a desert and reading as necromancy. The desert here is both literal (as the ever-shifting "dune-script" of meaning) and a place "deserted", a place of the always-already absent voice, into which the reader is invited to venture out. Reading as necromancy entails summoning the voice of the absent/"dead" author, communing with the past action(s) of signification and by decoding it, yielding messages for (some kind of) the future."Read this geometry in such a way as to allow the text unit increment itself to be unbounded, allowing for fragments of itself to be discorporated in such a way as to interlock-in voxelized gradient-with vacancies identical to those fragments excised from the primary corpus of the text unit itself in such a way as to be both of itself and containing another, like a splinter of bone healing into liver tissue."-John Trefry, author of Plats"Mike Corrao's Desert Tiles takes an ekphrastic approach to our probable swallow by ocular data. The writer/reader is in a state of pixelated becoming. There is no what it/we/they become(s), nor how, nor why, even - a barely-where "textures are compressed and corrupted" and a barely-who "hums their jaw against the sand." Something is in process of being downloaded, devoured, dissolved. It's icky, because it's true. What happens when the happening is pure mechanics, an I thinking and therefore (without reason). As the body is desertified, the body-esque remains: a fine-grained graphic that "yawns and weeps" even while you (the body? Or body-esque?) "want to cry, but are incapable." In the poem "you ask yourself if this still counts as lived experience," while IRL you are wondering if you count as something R and L? Or "is its not being real really that important?" A proper noun believes in something, like the moon landing, or politics, or that 7up & saltines will cure a stomachache. "The static speaks to me." Poor robots, I think, poor tin man. A heart and blood are black and white and indexed quietly, and the index beats. Who will read all the indexes left behind, desiring their un-deserted world? One might desire the desert. Liking the gray sand. And then what."-MJ Gette, author of The Walls They Left Us"Set in a desert created by a 'borgesian deity,' a wandering 'wastrel-form' encounters a Necromancer. This isn't the Desert of the Real, but a literary simulacrum where wanderer and Mancer engage in a dance of death (or birth)? Corrao reveals a book giving birth to itself, not as a postmodernist contrivance, but as a slow-paced prose poem. Body horror collides with a kind of digital mysticism. With both words and images, we witness a sky the color of TV tuned to a dead channel and the birth of the new flesh."-Driftless Area Review

Fiction. NATURAL COMPLEXIONS is a biting satire on modern life as lived online and virtually more than here and now, saturated by media idiocy and the closed circuits of celebrity status at every turn. Its masterful combination of hilarity and eeriness functions as a 21st-century upgrade of the Kafkaesque--both in its compressed epigraphic form and in its obsession with the (im)possibilities of the sacred. Is Wilson's book vying for a scandal? What would that, in 2018 America, even mean?

Fiction. Set in and around Jardin des Plantes, Paris, Europe, the World, the Universe, Armand's short novel is a whodunit with multiple twists. The setting of the tale against a backdrop of fossils and marvels of taxidermy gives Armand's story a macroscopic dimension. As if the evolution of an entire species could be compressed into several hours of a Sunday morning. As if a tale of a murdered schoolteacher and a vengeful mob could tell of speciation and extinction throughout the evolutionary history of life on Earth. And it can. Armand's deftly written fragmentary narrative is a point-counter-point of silent unheard voices, whose apocalyptic finale eschews euphony in favour of a cacophonous refusal of resolution. "NO END"--loose ends being preferable to final solutions...