Anarcadium Pan

Watson, Carl

Erie Street Pr

Fiction. Carl Watson applies his eye and hand via pathos, paranoia and chaos to the over-urban world of Chicago's Uptown district, his slices of life housed under such excited mental categories as "Descenders to the Skin Cage," "The Body Like an Arrow on a Nomad Map," "Swirling Birds In the Mind is a Sign of Madness," "Escape from the Totalitarian State of Flight," "They Could Be Cannibals." Acclaimed artist Joe Coleman's paintings dot Watson's pages like interim chapters, each its own explicit but encrypted sad tale. As Watson notes, "Sometimes an event is interpreted as 'news' and re-fed into the system forming a feedback loop that ramifies its every minute aspect until it actually posits a threat that overwhelms so-called reality or 'sense'" Watson's Uptowners reside in a gray zone outside the margin of The News, but they still make their own noise--a murmur not a whimper.

Beneath the Empire of the Birds

Literature & Fiction

Apathy Press Poets

"Amongst the oil fumes and the briny dinge of the sea, greasy, tired, frustrated, I had a flash. Suddenly, I had it all figured out-the psychology of despots and CEOs. I figured that in order for civilization to exist, people have to stay in one place, and so it seems somehow natural that the evolution of society would be to create an illusion of motion where none exists. Faster cars. Faster editing. Increased sensory stimulation. But all the while we are actually sitting more and more still. The population is placated by the feeling of progress, when in reality they are imprisoned. Even if we feel or strive to be utterly irresponsible, we're still somehow doing our job." Carl Watson evokes his desolation angels with great empathy and care, but also with ruthless candor. He writes like someone who pushed himself to the wall, then pushed through it to the void and came back with stories to tell. Here he reclaims the Seventies, one of the more desolate of recent epochs, with the clarity of Proust, the balefulness of Bodenheim, and the raw honesty of an Iggy song. -John Strausbaugh, author of Black Like You and Sissy Nation "CW writes like he put his thumb in the air on some two-lane American highway that used to be an Indian Trail, where he got picked up by God. Like he has come back to the fire in the woods we have gathered around at the end of the world with our loved ones to tell us what he saw. -Andrew Huebner, author of We Pierce, American By Bloodand East of Bowery With prose unfurling like cigarette smoke bleeding into that cloud of half-forgotten memories forever shadowing missed opportunities that hangs over a noonday dive somewhere during the twilight of the last blown century, heartbreak rock-n-roll on the radio crackling in exquisite precision between am stations and windswept interstates, Carl Watson daydreams before silent black-and-white televisions in SRO lobbies or as he drinks himself sober in crumbling Chicago tenements. Backwards the Drowned Go Dreaming explodes the bleary-eyed myth of the American road. -Donald Breckenridge, author of This Young Girl Passing Carl Watson's work is desolate poetry. He writes with sharp nostalgia for a past that really wasn't all that great. It feels like a stay in a down-and-out motel, but right on the other side of the paper-thin wall is transcendence. Watson never lets you forget that even in the most desperate situations, there is humor (even if it's mostly black) and greatness of the spirit. -Emily XYZ, United States of Poetry

Backwards the Drowned Go Dreaming

Contemporary

Sensitive Skin Magazine

Sensitive Skin #13 features writing by Stewart Home, Peter Blauner, Hal Sirowitz, Thaddeus Rutkowski, Erik Noonan, Robert C. Hardin, D. James Smith, Carl Watson, Matt McClaren, Christopher Romero, Max Blagg, B. Kold, Hilary Holladay, Jonathan Shaw, Ron Kolm and Patrick O'Neil, with art by David de Biasio, Justin Clifford Rhody, Julia Kissina, Alex Katz, Samoa and more.

Sensitive Skin #13: Art & Literature for and by the Criminally Insane

BLAUNER, Peter

Rutkowski, Thaddeus

Home, Stewart

Meisler, Bernard

Blagg, Max

Hardin, Robert C.

Literary

Sensitive Skin Books

Based on the real memoirs of Mr. Watson's grandfather, this story follows Kid Clay through the Old West in search of a cowboy adventure. During his escapades, Kid Clay leaves his comfortable Kentucky home at the age of fifteen and sets out to discover what it's like to be a real cowboy. During this time, he encounters many colorful characters such as Indians, Buffalo Bill, and members of the Dalton Gang. Along the wagon trail, he encounters typhoid, cattle rustlers, stampedes, bank robbers, and a beautiful Indian maiden. Kid Clay has the determination and bravery he needs to survive, but as he makes his way along the trail, he discovers that the West is beginning to change. That's when he makes a momentous decision that will affect the rest of his life. Was the West more than Kid Clay bargained for?

Kid Clay

Genre Fiction

W & B Publishers Inc.

They used to drink a concoction in Harlem called Top-and-Bottom, or Half-and-Half. It was a glass of straight gin topped with cheap red wine. Watson at his best is a variation on this drink: rot gut gin mixed with Haut-Brion instead of piquette .... In these days when most short fiction is so affected that it seems to move across the page like a vain actor across the stage, Watson’s words give us something good and something real. In this his work is of rare value. No one who enters into it will emerge quite the same. Nick Tosches, from the introduction to the French publication of Sous l’empire des oiseaux 
 Carl Watson is a true visionary and an artist of letters, who also happens to be a pure pleasure to read. John Strausbaugh 
 Carl Watson gets the hiphop of the mind in the electro-apocalypse of multi-national succubi…. He gets the rhythm of it, he gets its deep logic, he gets the insidiousness of its twining round the DNA of our zombie era of consumerist oubliette. Robert Siegle, author of Suburban Ambush 
 The cage hotel that modern man calls a mind is irrevocably set for Carl Watson’s haunting drift into a world of ever-changing frames. Literature has rarely summed up the terror of being so vividly. Thierry Marignac, author of Fasciste and A quai 
 A writer who knows well the dark recesses of the human mind. Encore

Idylls of Complicity

Spuyten Duyvil Publishing

Scott Schroeder dreams of a day when he and his father can have a home of their own. Following an accident that took his mother's life eight years before, doctors discovered Scott was suddenly deaf. Blessed with being an accomplished gymnast and skilled at signing and reading lips, Scott's biggest challenge is convincing others he is able to do all the same things as those in the hearing world. Picking up on conversations he observes along the way, Scott figures out a big family secret concerning his father and uncle and makes his mind up to play a part in their reconciliation.

Silent Journey

Children's Books

Growing Up & Facts of Life

Red Chair Press

Hank Stone et le coeur de craie

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

VAGABONDE

After Thought

Short Stories & Anthologies

Independently published

The Phantom Wolf of Lookout Mountain

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Fantasy

Christian Faith

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Books by Watson, Carl