Poetry. Fiction. In this indeterminate text comprised of letters, resembling both fiction and poetry but not wholly comfortable in either category, each sentence is like being stabbed by a beautiful murderer, each new entry like crossing a border into another language. "As intimate as it is expansive, this hybrid prose-poem-novel trips from razor-blade symphonies, to the history of stares, from landlord snitches to basement laments, leading readers down existential corridors that blaze with the dark humor of guilt, of loneliness, and of wishes for vengeance that speak eloquently of what we can find at the core of humanity"--Steve Tomasula. Goransson was born and raised in Skane, Sweden, but has lived in the US for many years. He is co-editor of Action Books and has translated the work of Aase Berg, Henry Parland, Ann Jaderlund and other Swedish and Finland Swedish poets.

Dear Ra (A Story in Flinches)

Literature & Fiction

Göransson, Johannes

Contemporary

Starcherone Books

Poetry. Welcome to Johannes "private genocide," ground zero for figurative language. Put on your best pig smile and meet the gratuitous martyrs, Kublai Khan, Colin Powell, the jackle-hearted masses, Herman Melville, Egyptian dogs, and the Coca-Cola Cowboys. They're all in the burning barn at the Big Dance where the Ballad of the Pig Circus plays like a torso full of "October of birds." Beauty becomes "a riddle doused in gasoline" in this Postmodern epic that mixes surrealist impulses with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E-esqe prosody. Notions of genre are demolished and language itself seems relegated to a wildly impossible epistemological space that is something akin to "whispering in hammers" or "speaking in silhouettes." If this sounds confusing, don't worry, the poet has sewn it all together with a "travesty of stitches," and he has "left his body inside the allegory." The poet satirizes, prods, pastiches, and "grotesquerizes" until every assumption we have, cultural or personal, crumbles in re-invented idiom.

A New Quarantine Will Take My Place

Poetry

Apostrophe Books

Pilot (Johann the Carousel Horse) is an assemblage, a book of nursery rhymes gone wrong in translation. Its strange characters, abandoned from other texts, include Lilja, the Pearls of Stockholm and assorted imperiled girls. Here, in Johannes Goransson's glittering exocity, they find a new and beautifully stitched home.

Pilot (Johann the Carousel Horse)

Fairy Tale Review Press

Poetry. Cross-Genre. Fiction. Drama. "It would take a miracle to perform this pageant. For a start, you would have to reanimate Charlotte Brontë, Adolf Loos, and Ronald Reagan, and you would need an ungodly amount of wax. Most of the action is obscene, and therefore takes place offstage. The actors enter and report on scenes of spectacular violence that go on all the time every day. The audience is part of the spectacle too. We are all transformed into images somewhere in this script. At one point, all of Hollywood appears onstage on the form of dead horses, perhaps because Hollywood film continues to rely on narrative conventions that it exhausted long ago. The entire world also appears, played by a boy who, in a series of rapid costume changes, puts on increasingly pretty dresses"—Aaron Kunin.

Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate

Tarpaulin Sky Press

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry, Frost is often quoted as having said, is what is lost in translation, and American poets and critics have long taken this as their cue to subordinate translation to other forms of literary activity and to disqualify translated texts. In TRANSGRESSIVE CIRCULATION, poet, translator, and publisher Johannes Göransson reverses this dynamic, holding that we should use translation to re-assess our entire aesthetic establishment. Rather than argue against the denigration and abjection of translation--and most foreign texts--this book investigates those dark zones of expulsion as grounds for new possibilities, not just for translation but for literature as a whole.

Transgressive Circulation

Essays & Correspondence

Noemi Press

Back in print in a newly revised and expanded edition, Dear Ra is an exhibition of an inimitable literary talent. The text therein is an assemblage of letters reminiscent of that daunting and delicate space where prose and poetry collide. Göransson's cult-hit may in fact be a the sort of literary spell conjured from the ether to be as much your demise as your greatest dream. There are few genocides as important as the ones that reside in the human imagination.

Dear Ra

Literary

Civil Coping Mechanisms

Fiction. Poetry. "Maybe I should try to wake up. Maybe I should try and forget about Father Voice-Over. Maybe I should try and look away—but I can't. 'News organizations are setting up temporary stations in the mansion. When do you expect the Black Man to show up, one reporter asks me. I'm wearing a new suit, which was made in China, by a Chinese child listening to a mechanical bird tell them about Art.' Göransson's HAUTE SURVEILLANCE is so riveting, so fiercely imagined, so febrile and alive to the violence of our moment, so passionate—its images unbidden, its narrative a continual surprise. It's a work so filled with invention and wit and ferocity that I was compelled to read it, at times against my will, mesmerized, enthralled."—Carole Maso

Haute Surveillance

Poetry. "It's as though his poetry takes us to the forest in Lars von Trier's Anti-Christ, where it's filmed, but then suddenly we find ourselves standing in front of a vanished movie theatre of our home. Göransson's poetry is a film that Death peeks at, the scene of shooting the film, the film shot on a roll of film, the movie theatre, the Arcadia. A single poem is the world's interior and exterior, it convulses wildly like an animal that has eaten the poem's interior and exterior all together with silver. bang bang."—Kim Hyesoon "'I make a language out of the bleed-through.' Göransson sure as fuck does. These poems made me cry. So sad and anxious and genius and glarey bright."—Rebecca Loudon

The Sugar Book

History & Criticism

”A feverish and explicit set of images and ideas revolving around power, fetish, porn, media, violence, translation, punishment, performance, and aesthetics. Taking its title from a Jean Genet play of the same name, it’s kind of like a novelization of a movie about the production of a play based on Abu Ghraib, though with way more starlets and cocaine and semen. . . . Beautifully startling and f*cked and funny and tender and sad and putrid and glitter-covered all at once.” — Blake Butler, VICE Magazine ”Maybe I should try to wake up. Maybe I should try and forget about Father Voice-Over. Maybe I should try and look away—but I can’t. . . . Göransson’s Haute Surveillance is so riveting, so fiercely imagined, so febrile and alive to the violence of our moment, so passionate—its images unbidden, its narrative a continual surprise. It’s a work so filled with invention and wit and ferocity that I was compelled to read it, at times against my will, mesmerized, enthralled.” — Carole Maso ”Göransson’s fast-paced, present-tense writing critiques itself while moving forward, collapsing together all of discourses and vocabularies associated with the nightly news, feminism, sexual identity, Hollywood movies, science fiction, performance art, pornography, and poetry invested in the stable lyric ‘I.’ Bots from academia mix with bits of the street. . . . Goransson turns it into a book that is unclassifiable — part epic poem, part science fiction, part pornographic film, and all literature.” — John Yau, Hyperallergic

Doubling down on his trademark misanthropic imagery amid a pageantry of the unpleasant, Johannes Goransson strolls through a violent Los Angeles in this hybrid of prose and verse.... The motifs are plentiful and varied, including constant reworkings of image-driven ideas, among them prostitution, pubic hair, Orpheus, law, pigs, disease, Francesca Woodman ... and the speaker’s hunger for cocaine and copulation.... Fans of Goransson’s distorted poetics will find this a productive addition to his body of work. (Publishers Weekly) Sends its message like a mail train. Visceral Surrealism. His end game is an exit wound. (Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle, Fanzine) As savagely anti-idealist as Burroughs or Guyotat or Ballard. Like those writers, he has no interest in assuring the reader that she or he lives, along with the poet, on the right side of history. (James Pate, Entropy Magazine)

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Göransson, Johannes. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Göransson, Johannes

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Göransson, Johannes. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Dear Ra (A Story in Flinches)

A New Quarantine Will Take My Place

Pilot (Johann the Carousel Horse)

Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate

Transgressive Circulation

Dear Ra

Haute Surveillance

The Sugar Book

Haute Surveillance

The Sugar Book