Description

Calamari Archive, paperback

Publication Date: March 15, 2010

Publisher Marketing: Slim, but with as many wildly disparate imaginative scenes and situations as a massive Pynchon novel–miners, polar bears, insurgents sweeping the desert in Toyota pickups, a detective on the trail of illegal fur traders, Venus Williams’ deconstructed forehand, wild horses, blooming chrysanthemums, tadpoles eating corpses in the Euphrates, and so much more–Leslie Scalapino’s FLOATS HORSE-FLOATS OR HORSE-FLOWS is a startlingly beautiful, politically engaged, poetic novel. Narrative moments arrive out of inchoate states–an alexia where unknown words create a future–and the reader is continually and unexpectedly moved by the buoyancy and breathtaking velocity of Leslie Scalapino’s language. “This is a jewel book that has come out of the spagyric hinterlands of purest imagination, where it has lain for an immeasurable time alongside Burroughs’s Cities of the Red Night, Hans Arp’s poetry, Monkey’s Journey to the West, and Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger–and it blows with the elegance of a horse–or a wolfVirginia Woolf!”–Michael McClure.