Critical Impressions: "Depersonalization and derealization are cardinal features of the schizophrenic experience. In Plats we enter into this anxiety-provoking, frightening world. It's a fascinating, disquieting journey.” -Dr. Kayla Bernheim, author of "Schizophrenia: Symptoms, Causes, Treatments" "One of the most original meditations on sensory experience I can recall reading." - Joe Milazzo, author of "Crepescule W/ Nellie" "Elusive and amorphous as the whistle of a distant train, yet hard-hitting as the train itself, Plats is the braiding of unfettered thought and structured design. Architect and poet come together in this superbly beautiful and disturbing journey whose imagery seduces the reader into a troubled, haunting world." -Susan Crawford, author of "The Pocket Wife" The first novel by American writer, John Trefry, 'Plats' is a meditation on life in Los Angeles. In the tradition of the prose form-making of Michel Butor, 'Plats' is a masonry text built of modular narrative elements and settings, a textual city to be explored by the reader, where in a single breath coexist dusty apartments and vacant beaches, reinvention and suicide, haunting and hiding, endless labor and crippling idleness, mint tea and storm waters. The city changes secretly, behind layers of paint and pelts of mildew. Against this stagnant backdrop, inhabitants struggle to observe the passage of their lives. With the hypnotic action of a rising and falling tide, the reader floats through a suite of interchangeable women looking for escape in place-names, in the changing minutiae of their skin and clothing, in the hydrological cycle of a seaside desert, and in the possibilities apparent in one another's lives. They steal each other's shoes, mail, apartments, and identities with the hope of getting one step closer to distinguishing themselves from the refuse of the unchanging city.

Plats: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Trefry, John

Literary

Inside the Castle

"Hour of the Wolf" is a hypnagogic incantation from writer M Kitchell (Spiritual Instrument, Island, Apart From). Robed figures and furry men, ice caves and deserts, god and serpent, shapelessness and sacred geometry, mysterious artifacts and unfolding perceptions coalesce in a pentacle of overlaid story bodies, each sinking deeper into its own true consciousness, while at the same time constructing an indexical sequence of translation from raw sense to mediated artifice, a primer of the dissolution of life into text. "Hour of the Wolf" combine experience and meaning into a ritual object, a book that is not a place separate from this world, but an impossible place within it.

Hour of the Wolf

Kitchell, M

GAG: a sequence of rotting doors / mild suburban hell / rooms lorded over by men of obscenity / a blighted novella /sister book to PX138 3100-2686 User's Manual / a little limb, little dog / bodies trapped in basements / leather, plastic, film / pile of burnt manuscripts / Antonin Artaud's body writhing on an asylum floor / the outside world of light and terrors / an offensive dictionary / a song of TV's great criminals / mere book / the acorns on the forgotten grave of Donatien Alphonse Fran#65533;ois de Sade / a collection of evidence from taped cabinets."Strange and severe, reworking language into a series of ritual gestures, Gag takes the words and phrases you thought you knew and with them performs a new way of speaking, one that is sensation-based rather than knowledge-based. Gag is the kind of book that recomposes itself in the compost of your brain so that only days later do you realize what it's done to you."--Brian Evenson, author of A Collapse of Horses, Altmann's Tongue, and others"Reading Grant Maierhofer's Gag should feel like driving a manual car for the first time: jerky, disorienting, and neurotic." --Vi Khi Nao, author of Fish in Exile"Gag takes place in a haunting and unpredictable world where silence is pure, violence is a career, and everyone is meat. Reading this book is like entering a dream, or a nightmare, depending on the page." --Chelsea Hodson, author of Pity the Animal

Maierhofer, Grant

In the Desert of Mute Squares; Or, Errors; Or, Dreams I Never Had; Or, Late Capitalism is the titanic new text object from M Kitchell. In it’s production is the escape from the spaces of indentured tedium where the time is measured only by the presence of the body, into a nonspace of pleasure in impossible architecture and bodily torment &amp; this book is the nonspace of its reception. Excessive insanity / Copious Fluid. 454 pages.

In the Desert of Mute Squares

In the aftermath of a kidnapping...

Apparitions of the Living

From the poem TEPCO BEACH: Alone in the afternoon I biked back to TEPCO Beach. Under the overpass where a man lived with a pile of cans (could he be any man, in any city?) across the street from the COSTCO (through the bushes, over a little dirt, past a Chinese man fishing, clear line deep in muggy water). Full of space, Noor Al-Samarrai's El Cerrito works in the wandering traditions of the Japanese haibun and the Situationist International movement to populate forgotten city spaces with an echo chamber of memories, dreams, and historical accounts. A work of documentary and eco-poetics, it is also highly relational and revealing. “Outside myself, outside myself there is a world,” said William Carlos Williams as he wanders a park in Paterson. The wanderer is a key literary figure from Rousseau and Whitman to Baudelaire and Benjamin, yet so often that solo figure occupies the one gender and race historically granted the freedom to move. “I in a rainbow sparkled skirt I in rainbow speckle skirt mismatched socks hiking boots and turban in the gun shop” begins Noor Al-Samarrai’s fabulous El Cerrito, upending the exclusions of this tradition with style and guts. But’s it’s not just the pleasures and verve of the female dandy at play here, for El Cerrito is abundantly, even extravagantly footnoted with detailed histories of the many streets, monuments, eco-systems, industries and peoples she wanders among. Enormously pleasurable, part travelogue, part historical excavation, part chronicle of the eros of friendship, El Cerrito is a dynamic debut, rich with probing intelligence and soaring with lyric freedom. -Julie Carr, author of Think Tank

El Cerrito

Al-Samarrai, Noor

Poetry

A 100,000 word computer generated novel about a time-traveling manifestation of the Zodiac Killer created for the Inside the Castle "Castle Freak Residency" over a period of 5 days in November 2017.

Lonely Men Club

Kleine, Mike

Belfie Hell is anti-roman ... anti-novel ... anti-anti-novel ... I awoke wrong ... incorrect ... nightmarish ... scared ... drained from a blessing ... hounded by pig cops ... held in riots not anticipated. My shipmates began to read my mind. I bathed in a parody of my real self. I was shrewd ... inept ... but I was calculating pride ... thus I had to speak ... put word down.

Belfie Hell

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Christmass, Shane Jesse

Thrillers & Suspense

“Candice Wuehle’s BOUND is of presence and practice. It is of enactment and performance. It carries with it something that reminds me of how the forest is and how it comes to be. The intimacy of the play between something magnetic and inevitable and something you couldn’t prepare yourself to meet save keeping your porous body trembling. “NoOne was the only one witnessed me / act out this poem,” says Wuehle’s work, its voice emerging from all angles. This is poetry that is feminine and magic on its own luminous terms, via a shimmering of the literary politic and its unspoken / spoken laws. “Speak your odd offer or the spell / can’t craft. Lots of this NoOne wants.” Like Lisa Robertson or Selah Saterstrom, Wuehle reminds us that poetry and art don’t ask us for anything, but we could give ourselves to it. When we do, there we are, unfolding in the form, in the word, in the forest. I underline a line that says, “We’ve all been here a long time.” I find BOUND incredible and filled with a movement I’ll return to, that I’ll continue to watch / change.” -Carrie Lorig, author of The Pulp vs. The Throne

Bound

Wuehle, Candice

CLOG, the sister book to 2017's GAG. Unmitigated dinge and tremolo blur prose with derelict photographs by New Juche.

Clog

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Books by Inside the Castle