Parataxis by Matt Hill

An assemblage of seventy nine prose poems, PARATAXIS is an attempt to map out some of the territory between the mundanely surreal and the ordinarily strange. Written in a prose style devoid of connective punctuation, these lyrically eclectic sequences depict the improbable as seen through the everyday windows of crucial viewings. Written to indicate the overlooked, the pervasively assumed, and the absurdly bogus elements that lurk and loom in our daily engagements, PARATAXIS weaves questions of personal metaphysical import through one man’s life-fabric, replete with a provocative tone indicating the salvaged insights from many years of hard-edged living.

These brief essay-like prose poems are technically parataxial, but at the same time make considerable discursive sense.   However, if one considers them as parataxic in a larger sense something unexpected happens: a sense of disconnection is created between the voice and what that voice says, as if some things were just too painful or complex to fully recognize.   Running through these very intimate passages is a nagging awareness of the absurdities of our social and political realities, “…the bastardeconomics, now insurging our future…”, “…where the Vulgarati gibber on…”    It is perhaps this attempt to speak of and to these issues and thus, perhaps, have some control over the decay of our social life that is this book’s real obsession.

­—John M. Bennett

“… swaying between Baudelairean modalities of social spleen and lyric fervor, perceptions fresh and exacting; each piece demands utopia, and measures reality by its absence.”

—Andrew Joron

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Still living in the Santa Cruz Mountains, Matt Hill has authored two books of prose poems, several chapbooks, and has also edited a compilation of random quotations. The Marshall Creek Press series of avant-garde chapbooks (1995-97) was edited and published by him. One day, he still intends to make it to New York City.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 85 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 1-934289-88-4

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