Synopses & Reviews
Fiction. A collection of short stories refracting the dread and isolation of contemporary life through a series of formal/generic lenses, producing a distorted, attenuated, spasmatic experience of time, as accompanies motherhood; making impossible any thinking in terms of conventional temporalities or even causalities, let alone their narrative effects.
"He who shrinks from the flames will never command Salamanders."—Arthur Edward Waite
"As to the Salamanders, the igneous inhabitants of the fiery region, they serve the philosophers, but are not anxious to court their company.... If you would recover the empire over the Salamanders, purify and exalt the Natural Fire that is within you. Nothing is required for this purpose but the concentration of the Fire of the World by means of concave mirrors in a globe of glass. In that globe is formed a Solary Powder, which being of itself purified from the mixture of other elements, and being prepared according to Art, becomes in a very short time a sovereign process for the exaltation of the Fire That Is Within You and will transmute you into an igneous nature."—Abbé de Villars
"Thou art exalted above them, O radiant Fire! There Thou kindlest Thyself and maintainest Thyself by Thine own Splendour, and there go forth from Thine Eternal Essence inexhaustible streams of Light which nourish Thine Infinite Spirit. Thine Infinite Spirit produces all things and causes the inexhaustible treasure of matter, which can never fail in that generation which forever environs it, because of the forms without number wherewith it is pregnant and wherewith Thou in the beginning didst fill it.... We hum with desire to possess Thee, O Father, O Mother, who art tenderest of Mothers, O wonderful exemplar of the sentiments and tenderness of Mothers, O Son, the flower of all Sons, O Form of all Forms, Thou Soul, Spirit, Harmony and Number of all things!"—Porphyry
"One would not make love to a salamandrine during a sandstorm."—Aleister Crowley
Synopsis
Fiction. "One would not make love to a Salamandrine during a sandstorm," wrote Aleister Crowley, anticipating by some sixty years the note of caution that Tarpaulin Sky must attach to the Black Book whose image now burns before you: Dear Reader, banish all received notions of narrative, of language itself. Masquerading as a collection of short stories, SALAMANDRINE is a channeled text, moonchild, unholy offspring of poetry and Loser Occult. Refracting the dread and isolation of contemporary life through a series of formal/generic lenses, producing a distorted, attenuated, spasmatic experience of time, as accompanies motherhood, Salamandrine renders impossible any thinking in terms of conventional temporalities or even causalities, let alone their narrative effects. SALAMANDRINE is the high magick of art so low it crawls. Like a toddler at a poetry reading. With a taste for achilles heels. Hell-bent on bringing literature itself to its knees.
"If you would recover the empire over the Salamanders, purify and exalt the Natural Fire that is within you."——Abbé de Villars
"He who shrinks from the flames will never command Salamanders."—Arthur Edward Waite
About the Author
Joyelle McSweeney is the author of six books, including SALAMANDRINE: 8 GOTHICS (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2013), THE COMMANDRINE AND OTHER POEMS (Fence Books, 2004), FLET: A NOVEL (Fence Books, 2007), NYLUND, THE SARCOPHAGER (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2007) and PERCUSSION GRENADE: POEMS and PLAYS (Fence Books, 2012). Her book THE RED BIRD (Fence Books, 2002) was chosen by Allen Grossman to inaugurate the Fence Modern Poets Series in 2001. McSweeney is a co- founder of Action Books and Action, Yes, a press and web-quarterly for international writing and hybrid forms, and a contributing editor of the culture blog montevidayo.com. She holds degrees from Harvard, Oxford, and the Iowa Writers Workshop, and is an associate professor in the creative writing program at the University of Notre Dame.