Nicholas Alexander Hayes

These idioms and tales use language as a tool to lift a hazy film away from our perception and replace it with another. Is it surgery or a theater of cruelty, a catastrophe or a joke? It’s an intervention into both the real and the imaginary—not to show us that one lies beneath the other or hidden inside like a nested doll, but to remind us that animals are composed of wounds and words and that all of us are dying. It isn’t pretty, and it is. It isn’t imaginary, and none of it is real. It’s a vicious and lyrical, lucid and fantastical, vast little book. – Stephen Beachy

Revising rule and ritual of the holy books, the speaker of these re-tellings drips distorted light on some of the ancient obsessions to make them appear strange in their familiarity and familiar in their strangeness. With a mathematical precision and the patience of an engineer, Nicholas Alexander Hayes' first book offers holy enemies, licked-up Lords and unclean priests, harlot judges, names that burn, locusts who attack lions, and borders that force peace. — Daniel Borzutzky