MORPHEUS: A BILDUNGSROMAN by John Kinsella

    Morpheus has its origins in a novel John Kinsella worked on in his late teens — a time of transition between adolescence and adulthood, but not a time before he had at least glimpsed the contours of the vast, interconnecting literary project that was to be his lifelong pursuit. An amalgam of realism and fantasy, of fiction, poetry, and drama, the project limned the phantasmagoric yet self-questioning and disciplined emotional terrain that has so captivated and intrigued his many current readers worldwide.

    But the young Kinsella never adequately “completed” Morpheus. This may be no accident, as Morpheus is so protean, so heterogeneous, and so capacious that, conceptually, it may defy completion. Kinsella thus shelved the project as he began to develop his characteristic adult idiom, which has articulated itself largely though not exclusively in lyric poetry.

—Nicholas Birns, from the introduction: Forging the Unimaginable: The Paradoxes of Morpheus

John Kinsella’ Morpheus is everything you’ve ever wanted in a work of literature / and also nothing at all / in precisely the same isomorphic location / Morpheus is the precocious explosion of delightful incision from a teenager revisited by the ghost of his future / and also the failure of this incision to cut anything but itself for / this isn’t a novel / in the way Naked Lunch is not a novel / but a suspended solution / and Morpheus is not juvenilia / and / this is not even a blurb / and you are not reading these words / and / you can read Morpheus / if you like / or / let it read you your future / or / leave / it / unread / it / stands / remixed / and / open / remixed / and / endless

—Davis Schneiderman is the author of Drain (Northwestern), the DEAD/BOOKS trilogy—Blank, [SIC], Ink. (Jaded Ibis), and he once had dinner with John Kinsella / and / they / later / saw / a / fox

“A lyrical tour de force.  Literate, impassioned and often downright gorgeous, the prose sings with wit and vigor.  Add a little Dr. Benway to Stephen Dedalus, with a touch of Genet’s Divine, and you have a glimpse of Kinsella’s Thomas Icarus Napoleon, the hero of this literary drama.  Awesome.”

—Jeffrey Deshell, author of Arthouse (FC2) and The Trouble with Being Born (FC2)

John Kinsella is the author of many books of poetry, fiction, criticism and plays. He is a frequent collaborator with other poets, critics, fictionalists, artists, musicians, labourers, activists and friends. Recent fiction includes In the Shade of the Shady Tree (Ohio University Press, 2012), recent poety includes Jam Tree Gully (WW Norton, 2012), and recent criticism includes Activist Poetics: Anarchy in the Avon Valley (ed. Niall Lucy, Liverpool University Press, 2010). He is a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia, a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and the poetry editor for the literary journal Island. But most relevantly, he is an anarchist-vegan-pacifist. Kinsella’s activism against racism and bigotry began in his late teens when he was working on the first manifestation of Morpheus.