"Reflect that science fiction owes its greatest unpaid debt to surrealism, for suspending our disbelief in an invented future works best when our critical faculties are distracted and engaged by images from the unconscious. Now comes science fiction poetry's greatest practitioner, Bruce Boston, to repay a part of this debt in Surrealities, which is at once an introduction to the uninitiated, a handbook for the journeyman seeking to gain mastery, and an intoxication to those of us who fancy ourselves connoisseurs of the ...
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"Reflect that science fiction owes its greatest unpaid debt to surrealism, for suspending our disbelief in an invented future works best when our critical faculties are distracted and engaged by images from the unconscious. Now comes science fiction poetry's greatest practitioner, Bruce Boston, to repay a part of this debt in Surrealities, which is at once an introduction to the uninitiated, a handbook for the journeyman seeking to gain mastery, and an intoxication to those of us who fancy ourselves connoisseurs of the strange." - Lee Ballentine, author of Dream Protocols "Boston utterly transcends convention, highlighting many aspects of human experience inaccessible through the use of more traditional methods. Reading these poems is like embarking upon a trek through 'the depths of dreams, ' the 'infrastructure' of the soul itself! I celebrate the release of this work, a collection to which I shall, no doubt, frequently return." - John Amen, author of At the Threshold of Alchemy "Here, the surreal beauty of a muscular mind, poems like evil flowers, cachinnating snow monkeys, blue-eyed chateaus, scarlet snails. Here, all the boats are drunk, all the architecture soft and hairy, all the nights lit by giraffe fire, butterfly blaze. Here, Bruce Boston - investigating an horizon first mapped by Celan and Eluard, Tanguy and Tanning - rummages through each tree's drawer, behind perception's door, to find disturbing but strangely familiar shapes for language, longing, and love." - Bryan D. Dietrich, author of Universal Monsters "At times furious in its assault on the senses. At times curious in its nonchalance. This vein of poetics suits Boston oh so well. Like when he takes flight from a straight narrative thread and employs his vocabulary to high and exigent purposes, as in 'The Lateral Eclipse of Bound Sunsets.' And when he makes the mystery melancholy, as in 'Stray Acquisitions.' A master class on the motive/emotive powers of language." - Robert Frazier, author of The Daily Chernobyl "I read this collection straight off and loved it. If you like your poetry with a strong taste of the weird, the unusual and over-the-edge bizarre, you have to read this book." - Alan Catlin, author of The Insomniac's Gift
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