Description

Meekling Press,

Publication Date: October 1, 2024

Publisher Marketing:

Olivia Cronk’sGwenda, Rodneyis an exquisitely genre-ambiguous poetry novel scintillating with art, ardor, and decay. It’s a book about reading novels, ekphrasis, and the gaze, transcribed in a mode as ethereal as air filling a garment left to hang. Inspired by theater, Dario Argento’s luscious horror aesthetics, the gaudy-spectacle-art of Toulouse-Lautrecs paintings and Rainer Werner Fassbinders films, and the feeling of reading novels like drinking endless water,Gwenda, Rodney, is an inspiration, an exhalation, a quivering ruby of obsession on display.

Olivia Cronkis the author ofWOMONSTER(Tarpaulin Sky, 2020),Louise and Louise and Louise(The Lettered Streets Press, 2016), andSkin Horse(Action Books, 2012).

There is a great excitement in readingGwenda, Rodney, like coming to Mina Loy or Silvina Ocampo or Fleur Jaeggy for the first time, a feeling that you are experiencing literature at its most exhilarating, wild, and imaginative register. AMINA CAIN

“Olivia Cronk creates a world in which desire feels like dazzling bouquet of decay. InGwenda, Rodneywe encounter a web of relations punctuated by echoes, blood blooms, and hypnotic sequences. The details that structure the books scenes are marked by an iridescent, lurking under-hum. The effect is mesmerizing.” SELAH SATERSTROM

“Olivia CronksGwenda, Rodneypaints what it feels like to be consumed by a shadowy relationship where perceptions form a distorted reality and pull you deeper and deeper within. Everything is so slippery, from the language to the unexpected imageryall while handholds of reality are illuminated in flashes, much like being led into a dark room, shining a flashlight quickly. But it’s only temporary before shit becomes slippery again.” STEVEN DUNN