Two Degrees of Freedom / Simon Okotie — The Elevator / Imogen Reid

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NIGHTJAR PRESS 2021

My previous reviews of this publisher: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/nightjar-press/

When I read these two publications, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…

3 thoughts on “Two Degrees of Freedom / Simon Okotie — The Elevator / Imogen Reid”

  1. 90B98698-05DC-4AE6-9DCF-B056903EB683TWO DEGREES OF FREEDOM by Simon Okotie

    “…accommodating two wheels placed, one on each side, partially beneath that space to enable it to be propelled up a ramp…”

    F246E740-1598-4AB1-B802-4AA548703338Together with its many angular geometric polygons, this five page work has the once unique honour or both defeating me and inspiring me in equal measure: a Kafkaesque agglomeration of finding the self as the lockdowned in a panoply of geometrical gropings, in marked combined contradistinction to and harmony with the front cover. Arriving at the same time through the same letterbox a few days ago, this work reached me in my own dwindling lockdown along with the two works HERE, works that it supplements and is supplemented by, in their task to express our interminable groping co-vivid state hopefully of yore. It also supplements — governed by the happily serendipitous fates of synchrony that have grown in power recently — another brief story, one by Oscar Wilde, that I happened by chance to read earlier this morning HERE! The secret of the title is thus out as we half-inch along the precisely eked out degrees of renewed freedom.

  2. 107E8EF9-F6DC-441C-A256-07453D9CB304E47E1576-8E51-42A8-AD6E-252F6ED329F8THE ELEVATOR by Imogen Reid

    “…you lean into the cold metal, and the stench of disinfectant offends your olfactory nerve.”

    …being better than the smell of urine in the lifts in a similar tower block that I somehow chose by chance to specifically mention in my real-time review HERE yesterday. That story is one which this five-and-half page story synchronously supplements and is supplemented by in their mix of danger from stalkers (whether, in their separate ways, such stalkers are old or young, real or ghostly, male or female, bloodily brutal or subtly inveigling), here actually sensed in the lift itself as a stylistically effective merging with the lockdown apartment wherefrom it comes or whereto it goes. Stylistically in tune, too, with the Kafkaesque gropings toward the self as input within the the same package of today’s instinctive covivid sentiments, good or bad, bad or good. ON & OFF, by turns. Whichever the case, all four works do contribute to the new gestalt, in their separate standalone ways. This particular work’s wheel being of “propeller-like blades sweeping…”, this time sweeping around you whatever smell you can manage to smell, be it disinfectant or urine.