Acid Taste: Excavating the Homesick's Blues

by Émilie Galindo

Acid Taste: Excavating the Homesick's Blues is a utopian story in a wildly experimental package. Emma, Gab, Mo, and Ash are absent-mindedly riding the quotidian conveyor belt. Until one acid spiked Friday night, when Nora decides to take her friends down the spiral phone cord to her home village. There, the denizens are still on the line with ideals from another time. The side-tracked outsiders, holed up in other people’s prolonged or protracted denim & paisley values, learn to deal with another one-track, but trainless mindset. Their presence stirs orange rings in the village pot. Under the stoned yet dilated dial of the clocktower, enigmas are drawn on the walls and the past is dug up from under flying carpets.

158 pages, Paperback

Published January 10, 2025

Reviews

[Dia VanGunten · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a special book that isn’t being recognized by goodreads for its brilliance and it is maddening. I hope you’ll read it and give it a proper chance - it’s a cinematic work of sci fi and poetry so a reader should approach it as such, and allow themselves to slip into an altered state or a temporal trick. It’s got synesthesia & other senseory mischief and these elements are dazzling and delicious. I’m absolutely in love and I am convinced it will have a second incarnation as a graphic project. I even reached out to the author to discuss their openness to that idea and they are down, so I hope psychedelic artists buy this book and do fan art - tag the author! - and that hopefully grows into a collab. I’m putting this out there because I’m obsessed with the idea. I loved this book so much and was so deeply impressed with it on a craft level that I plan to write a larger review for a magazine. But I had to weigh in here because these ratings are nothing short of ridiculous.

[Michelle Graf · Rating 1 out of 5]

Thanks to NetGalley and Querencia Press for the ARC.

I kinda get what they were going for, but it was a confusing mess in execution. Switching between multiple unconventional forms in what's ultimately supposed to be prose did not help my comprehension. For a novella, this took a while for me to read.

[Pearl · Rating 1 out of 5]

Couldn't understand a word or the writing style, I have no idea what is going on.

[Emily Perkovich · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has definitely ended up in the wrong readers’ hands :/ i understand why there are people that “didn’t get it” but i am always confused when people that don’t enjoy/often read scifi-surrealism & experimental work pick up a title like this and expect it to read like the light surrealism that is just barely starting to make its way into the mainstream now. This book has lists, sections written in screenplay, poetry, a lot of stuff all working together on multiple timelines. For me, this was a fun read and the actual euphony of the work was lovely.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fall through the rabbit hole into a portmanteau of memoir, rememberance and surrealist syntax.
Ms Galindo writes in a way reminiscent of Appolinaire and more of Ferlinghetti. It follows a periodof time and group of friends and their experiences. She references some songs by the BAnd and Bob Dylan I thought cool enough, for someone who did not live through the early years of the expansion of psychedelic liberties, she does well to bring some 'head' aesthetics to her poetic style.
& if the rever was kool-aid...
Maybe she has more like this hiding in her desk...