The Daily Glance: One-Hitting the Wonders

Kristian Carlsson’s One-Hitting the Wonders is a fun book to read since he plays with language so much in such a self-aware way.  For example, there is a “Patriarchal Advisory” on the first page of the book that states “This book contains explicit abuse of interpuncutation.”  And on the page where we would typically get the copyright page, we get:
                This page is all faded.
                It is page 4.
                It is a copyright page.
                This page comes with complimentary WiFi.
                It is the webpage of unabridged chapterlessness of this fluent
                version with puppeteers.
The book is filled with these riffs on what is expected, and there are themes that repeats that give us a sense of an underlying theory. 
                ? and ¶
                are the hammer and sickle of the letters

                no line brake when a question is raised
There is a bit of humor here with the reference to communism, to Marx, and the use of “brake” signals a problem with a focus on linebreaks in contemporary poetic practice.  So, if you like poetry that questions what poetry is and that pokes at the edges of language, you should check out this book.  

As an aside: this book was published as part of Carlsson’s one book a month project for 2016.  I suspect it would be fun reading to go through all the books to see how they tied together; however, since many of the books are in Swedish, I am stuck waiting for a good translator. 


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