Within the
psychic architecture that is EVER, Blake Butler explores the way
bodies swell and contract, going from skin to house and back
again. And the
way houses too shrink to fit us first like clothing and then like skin
and
then tighter still. The result is a strange, visionary
ontological
dismemberment that takes you well beyond what you'd ever expect.
Brian Evenson
Blake
Butler
is a daring invigorator of the literary
sentence, and the room-ridden narrator of his debut novella, EVER, nerves her
way into a hallucinative ruckus of rousing originality.
Gary Lutz
In EVER – as in, indicating any time in the past
or future – light is entropic; “the sky could lift
your skin off”; domestic rituals are anamorphotic mind fucks
granting “no exit method”; and doors
won’t open even when you don’t try. Articulating
viscera, ever inside,
Butler’s narrative dispatches are enclosed between
parentheses like unfinished houses, the pages opening out occasionally
into exquisitely burnished fields of imagery. Much in the way minerals
are pushed up past the mantle by core collisions, EVER reads to me like
new evidence, delicate gear that allows us to glimpse a place
we’ve always lived but still don’t know.
Miranda Mellis
|
104 pp. Perfectbound. Illustrated
by Derek
White. $12 + s/h
| Excerpts: 13 Plastic Doors in Unsaid Magazine |
Comb
Room in Tarpaulin
Sky 15
| ORDER now from Calamari Press
* EVER on Goodreads
* Blake Butler interviewed by Rauan Klassnik
(author of Holy Land).
REVIEWS
* Johannes Goransson: 'What makes this novel very interesting in this context is
that it seems to be
written from the other direction - not a murder mystery that loses its
narrative, but a narrative-less cinematic body-fantasia in search
of a narrative.'
* Sean Lovelace: 'Ever has glide, that mysterious flow of words that will propel you down the
tunnels, down the plumbing
pipes, the doorways–into the walls. The walls of EVER: cold,
gray,
white and full, crumbling, crumbling within themselves, the null and
void of “…the
morning of no sun.”
* Luca Dipierro: 'Ever is one the few books that entered in my organism through my mouth instead
of my
eyes.'
* Daniel Bailey: 'the book reads like a massive poem to no one and nothing that has ever existed.'
* Kevin Wilson: 'if there ever was a book created to be read while holding a feverish baby against
your
chest, this is the book.'
