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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