Slow Slidings

by M Kitchell

Genres: Poetry

123 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2012

Reviews

[Gnome Books · Rating 4 out of 5]

Earth and body wrestling in the long night of place, "held tight inside the tomb of thisness." Bachelard's Poetics of Space extruded through Bataille's Solar Anus. "I love those who do not know how to live unless by going under, for they are the ones who cross over."

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

I may be missing one, but this may be the biggest run yet of one of M. Kitchell's singular publications, a collection via an imprint of the excellent Mud Lucious Press. Which is exciting and well-deserved. Collecting new stories since his prior self-published collection Exquisite Fucking Desire, this is divided into Architecture, Bodies or Objects, and Landscape, all frequently-expressed forms in his insular text-worlds. Includes a couple I've already got as zines or chapbooks ("Arebato" and "Cinema/Television/Passion"), a couple art-objects I'd missed before and am psyched to have now in some form ("Float" and "Text of Death"), and several I'd run into published elsewhere, but had to re-read anyway, because they're totally key works.

Foremost, the descent into text-fueled erotic obsession of "Loop" which sees the unnamed author/narrator finding a perfect body in an industrial derelict and then collapsing into his own obsession via endless written variations that modify and unmake the original scene, kind of, dragging him in further. These are the kinds of ghosts that populate Kitchell's stories, uncertain ghosts whose existence is delineated by their own descriptions, only to prove unstable to both author and observer.

Of those I hadn't seen before, opener "Drawers" got things elegantly moving: scenes from a single-room house that forms, it would appear, an archive of all of the universe and experience. Kind of a creepy maximalist Library of Babel, perhaps.

[Michael Seidlinger · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of a kind mixture of essay, fiction, and poetry. Michael Kitchell has a one of a kind mind and voice.

Gotta think... what is he working on next?

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

there were a few pieces i wasn't into as much, but this book mostly fucked my notion of how a book can work. this dude writes a love story in ways that no one has ever conceived. the story loop is something of a masterpiece.

[Robert Kloss · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an unrelenting, uncompromising book, whose only recent comparison is Blake Butler's There Is No Year, for its death and horror obsessions, for the way it shifts into dreams, into images, for its invigoration of often used post-modern forms, like lists and Q and A.

[J.A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is amazing how Kitchell gets seemingly disparate movements to hold together into this strange new narrative face, a monument to climb, and if you scale Slow Slidings, and you really should, the view is immense.

[Kenny Mooney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really quite a stunning book, the folding of dreams and nightmare images, into a series of strange texts and images, like a kind of crazed scrapbook-meets-essay-meets-fiction. Strikingly imaginative, in places haunting and in others funny, but always provocative in the best possible way. For readers, plenty to enjoy if you like to be challenged; for writers, something to think about when faced with the horror of the blank page. Fantastic.

[M. · Rating 5 out of 5]

-Reviewed by Thom James at Heavy Feather Review
-Interview with Blake Butler about the book at Vice

[Giles · Rating 4 out of 5]

feel like i'm gonna come back to this and re-read parts. really like everything about this book, 'overflowing' with creativity.

[Jonathan Mayhew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Death might not haunt death, but this book will haunt my thoughts. Wonderful collection of writings in a beautifully produced book.