Queen of Terrors: Fictions - Softcover

Kelly, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0929701402 ISBN 13: 9780929701400

Publisher: McPherson, 1994

Synopsis

In his fourth collection, Robert Kelly tracks the elusive subject of all narratives -- the self stripped bare, even -- into ever more personal territories. The stories (all but one composed in the past few years) share a common urge to break loose from the constraints of linear thought, employing cubist technique in the construction of experience. Gathered here are close to thirty works of varying style and length, but whether blazing a single page or sensuously occupying a novella's space, virtually every one tells of odd encounters with desire. The longest story, "The Red King," lies at the center of the book, a telling complement at twenty-five years' remove to the novella "Cities," collected in A Transparent Tree. Now, a man of gentle omnipotence, perhaps in the winter of life, reinherits his own body. A second long work, "In Irish America," explores the immigrant experience of displacement in thirty-two prose-poems meant to be read or sung aloud -- a species of image-filled music. As usual, this new collection will surprise even Kelly's most assiduous readers.

About this title

About the Author:

Robert Kelly was born in Brooklyn on September 24, 1935. He attended CCNY and Columbia University, and since 1961 has taught at Bard College. In addition to publishing four fiction collections and three special editions with McPherson & Company, over forty volumes of his poetry have appeared, the major collections having been published by Black Sparrow Press, including Kill the Messenger, which received the Los Angeles Times Book Award in 1980. Kelly also has been Poet in Residence at California Institute of Technology and Tufts University, and presently he teaches in the writing program Bard College.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Kelly (Cat Scratch Fever, 1991, etc.), long a poetic innovator, continues to prove himself equally prolific and adept at ``fictions.'' Incorporating neither character nor plot, these 24 cerebral pieces meditate on the lofty and the mundane. From the opening story, ``Rimbaud Back from Abyssinia,'' Kelly makes it clear to whom he speaks: an informed, literary reader who is familiar not only with Rimbaud's poetry but with his life. Many pieces show Kelly involved in a struggle to take the courtly concepts he's handled so well in his poetry and merge them with a thoroughly modern sensuality that incorporates schlock culture, the mystical, and the primitive. ``They call death the King of Terrors, and I'm telling you who his queen is. Sex is the Queen,'' he says in the work which gives the volume its title. Time and again, the writer/philosopher seeks to bond with nature: The adult crosses the wind's fence, last barrier between himself and the sea; the child leans out a window, desperate to learn how birds fly. Sex elicits nature metaphors as well; in ``Red Crow'' the narrator's tongue massages a loved one ``like a little wet animal looking for a nest.'' Kelly's erudite playfulness is easiest to see in ``The Red King,'' simply because this novella- length work permits each element more room to vie for attention. But far more interesting (i.e., accessible) is the volume's other long piece, ``In Irish America,'' which traces his ancestry and places Celtic symbology beside flaccid contemporary references, mercilessly contrasting the legendary warriors who thought they would soon ``die, drip of our wounds... and go to America'' with his own birth in the United States. An excellent sampling of Kelly's diversity and a must-read for his coterie of followers, this volume will win him few, if any, converts. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: McPherson
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0929701402
• ISBN 13: 9780929701400
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 158