From its sinister title we get the clue that this book is not for the faint-hearted, evoking, as it does, an intriguing amalgamation of murder and nostalgia. And this extraordinary tome certainly lives up to its contradictory oxy(moronic) moniker. Being a treatise on the eternal contradictory nature of humanity itself, 42 reflective, titled statements; coupled with a series of illustrative, digitally manipulated visual poems read like a picture-book found under the mattress of an inmate in a psychiatric ward. Begging the question, what traumas has this troubled patient been party to? And the answer seems to be, LIFE! Imagine a library of self-help tomes, lifestyle magazines and science journals, jammed into a liquidiser with several pints of the author's own blood, seasoned with wit and cynicism and you have James Knight’s epic poem… Crossed between a serial killer's frenzied yet meticulous justification of their 'unspeakable' acts and a psychedelic creation myth dreamt up by a being desperate to mock and reveal something primordial/elemental about the cruel reality of existence, this beautifully rendered volume offers page after page of grotesque postcards from a writer who appears to be very close to if not almost over, the edge. As a multitude of universal words/images/themes emerge from this treatise: mouths, teeth, wombs, sperm, lightbulbs, rooks, butterfly-wings, part skeletons, part insects…we enter the nightmarish world of a monster maker, because this is what James Knight is. A skilled technician: he scalpels words, threads together bodies and weaves a realm of magical destruction. Should we take all this seriously? There are games at play. 43 The fact that halfway into it, the first part of the narrative steps ‘Through the Looking Glass’ indicates that there is mischief afoot. Familiar yet strangely different, the reflected text and images that confront us in the second part also tease us. We want to flick back to previous pages, compare notes, check to see if we have imagined things or not and try to decipher the esoteric messages/clues that have already been cleverly concealed within our unconscious minds. And to our amazement, somewhere amongst all this horror, we begin to have fun. Noticing the puns, wordplay and allusions that pepper the narrative, we realise that we too have been 'dismembered' and that our remembered selves and experience are perhaps not quite what we imagined them to be. I urge you, with caution and a healthy dose of curiosity, to cross the threshold and be both delighted and terrified by the weird world that James Knight continues to give life to from the heart of his prolific laboratory."
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DEAR READER
Welcome to my literature, music, and visual poetry project. My blog represents a method for deciphering the fragments left behind in the Anthropocene. Writers use ashes as a metaphorical device in storytelling. Have you ever wondered about the symbolism of ashes? Archaeological fragments of tablet, papyrus, bone, scroll, and pottery are recognizable the world over. In our digital era, however, our lost folkloric works disintegrate into dust. In this sense, I consume the silver flakes and use my he{art] as a vessel to rise from dystopic wastelands. I share lore through the oral tradition. Ashes to Ashes we continue on ∞ to infinity ∞ We are ash. We are stories. We are star dust. We are eternal.
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February 2023
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