A Book…
 

with a story by
JUSTIN ISIS
and some brief accounts by
SONGLING PU

.
Raphus Press 2019
My previous reviews of this publisher: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/raphus-press/ and of Justin Isis: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/justin-isis/
88DEFD62-E485-437F-BB64-9D375B22AACF Covfefe permitting, I shall review this book in the comment stream below…

2 thoughts on “A Book…”

  1. With over 60 pages between stiff luxurious boundaries, or rather two sets of over 30 pages each (one set in English, the other in Portuguese, as alternative renditions of the same works), my copy — a disarmingly dizzy topsy-turvy tête-bêche of an ‘Ace Double’ — is numbered by hand: 04/40.
    Sown with designs.
    First off…
    977AE525-5462-4BB4-807A-683ABBB2407B SNOW by Justin Isis
    ”…he felt as though he were reading a novel rather than the news.”
    The story features the man Hiroki and his relationship with others from two families (with children) as part of a nuclear family in one household with he and his lover as ‘mother’ and ‘father.’ I could easily have misinterpreted this situation, but I was intrigued with one child’s accident soiling himself at school (I know the humiliated feeling by dint of a distant memory!) and the home toilet later getting blocked (a phobia of mine!)
    Much, too, on algebra, the nature of some gloves, midges looking like eyelashes, and more.
    ******
    My contribution to understanding the Isis story…
    “Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them. But they were a part of me. They were my landscape.”
    ― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
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  2. THREE INVISIBLE STORIES by Songling Pu
    Translated by Herbert A. Giles (1880)
    The Magic Path, A Dwarf, The Butterfly’s Revenge
    7A9E8F52-2BA5-460F-851F-6F186A9B1FA9
    “Come along! just room for one more; you’re in the nick of time.”
    A healing luminous invisibility as a form of translucency: just discerning a group of literati under the moon welcoming Kuo to its close-knitted group. The irony, as a tall pillar of selves hawled up, only (only?) to become a horizontal path to walk upon towards the new transparency of death. Even a dwarf can be part of this adaptable ladder of endeavour, as righteous revenge against a foreshortened God who made him. Literati now as beautiful butterflies feeling vengeance against those who mock them, together with Songling birds, even parrots of rote, all ever part of literary patterns in rebellion — a battle as gestalt , alongside Gaia, against God as Man who is just one vital swallow short of panacea, “…cured, but unable to obtain the proper prescription.”
    end
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