Released 31st May 2022 // 70 pages // 978-1-915079-23-7
Világos has created a nightmare of language in which the shock of seeing sentences come apart, or the manipulation of sound to make an utterance seem oblique and dissonant, are present to the last. The section at the start of the collection, where the reader is met with an array of grammatical oddities and erroneous descriptions, is remarkable for its combination of chaos and order. The author makes a case for using the letter z so that there would be no need for any words containing the letter c; and the line about the C on the first verse is set to a song by the Scottish Folk rock band Penumbra Number One, an obscure band at the time.
Here, Világos has mastered the hard edge and profundity of language and set about making language seem silly and repetitive by folding it together into a tone which elevates it into poetry; in lines which combine and recombine, eventually working their way to absurdity. The reader is led to believe that the author has forgotten his place within the poem, or its language, and is forced into the absurd position of watching the language distort itself into incoherence. It suggests that language does not merely misdirect but hijack us, and that it has no respect for the speaker.
PRAISE for U. G. Világos:
Világos is an acute and brilliant poet, writing on being done wrong by the fiction of time and the system of the city. His is the poetry of the city that looks out into the night, time’s winged sparrow, and notes the sky, knowing that there are few takers, but wanting the praise anyway. It is a manifesto for the protest poetry of the future, a classic in the tradition of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl.
— Lizzie Violin, Lost Form Murders
Even in its war, or rather war of rhetoric and art, it creates room for the imagination, for the bodily act of constructing meaning. Világos has given us a collection of the temporal equivalent of large-scale physical protests, full of auspicia mundi and humus hile signs. ‘We shall be citizens of the real, we shall not die in vain.’ In the chaos of rebellion, new things will be born and the old, the patterned, will be left to die.
— Nicolette Grenadine, Sunday
This book is not only monumental, but also endlessly entertaining. It is organized by theme, and within each theme, not always by characters, but by subjects. The process of building these themes has been so complex and strange that it seems as though the true theme of the book is what Világos himself has called ‘the graphic process’.
— Ricky Cole, How to Die in Paris
‘For what is time, but the river in which everything that could not be has to flow through?’ These are the most arresting lines in Világos’ work. They are not just elegantly weird; they are a phenomenological ontology of the formative, disjunctive period of one’s life. At the centre of the book is an interrogation of time in flux; of arrival and departure, reflection and dispersion, dreams and text, planning and co-creation. These are shifts in the distance between past, present and future. They are recognisable reflections of the changing geography of life. It is often said that literature is ultimately about a search for home. Világos is, perhaps, our most interesting and definitive answer to that search.
— Matthew Mitero, City of Geist
Világos takes us through the problem of reference and out the other side. In an age of ultra high definition televisions which seem more real than real, literature remains a powerful technology to awaken us out of our stupifactions and stupid actions. The work here both critiques and expands radical publishing praxis into dimensions of prolific labour within the anonymity of the imaginary domain (Drucilla Cornell). By dwelling in alternative references, the power to shoot objects in the volatile field of cultural production is stimulated via simulation and the synthetic. Much of the future has been done and our job as readers is to recover its latent energy in the Now.
— Ziddy Ibn Sharam, Acharenement
