Aard-vark to Axolotl: Pictures from my Grandfather's Dictionary - Softcover

Donovan, Karen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0997745568 ISBN 13: 9780997745566

Publisher: Etruscan Press, 2018

Synopsis

Aard-vark to Axolotl, an eclectic series of tiny essays, is a collection of prose poems disguised as imaginary definitions, and a collaboration of text + image based on a set of illustrations from an old dictionary. Sometimes sneaky mysterious, sometimes downright weird, these small stories work on the reader like alternative definitions for items drawn from a cabinet of curiosities.

About this title

About the Author:

Karen Donovan is the author of two collections of poetry, Fugitive Red (University of Massachusetts Press), which won the Juniper Prize, and Your Enzymes Are Calling the Ancients (Persea Books), which won the Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor’s Choice Award. From 1985 to 2005 she co-edited ¶: A Magazine of Paragraphs, a journal of short prose published by Oat City Press. She works in communications for a nonprofit in Providence, RI.

Review:

For lovers of language, dictionaries, and magic, Karen Donavan is a balm to the soul. Her collection, Aard-vark to Axolotyl, plays off of the images found in her grandfather’s 1924 dictionary, and is reminiscent of Charles Simic’s Dime Store Alchemy and Frances Ponge’s The Nature of Things. Donavan is at once clever and witty, insightful and surprising, sophisticated and plain spoken. But be forewarned: she is wickedly addictive. Once I picked up this book, I could not put it down.  –Nin Andrews, Why God Is a Woman

I’ll save you some time. Just flip to the “index of proper nouns and terms” in the back of this here book. If you don't want to read about, in alphabetical order, campfires, carbon-12, catastrophe, charades, The Chicago Manual of Style, and chicken fingers, then what are you doing with your life? This blurb won’t help save you, but Aard-vark to Axolotl just might. –Ander Monson, Editor, Diagram and New Michigan Press

This collection reads like a genre of its own encompassing the autobiographical, the speculative, the scientific and the mythological. Spare and astringent in tone and rich in associative intelligence, each of these pieces turns out to be larger on the inside than the space it occupies on the page. There's considerable range here, much compacted surprise and delight, much "power and thrift." You'll encounter mermaids and tequila, pterodactyls and Spirographs, equations and schemata, all in the context of the extraordinary ordinary. "Go to it.  The book is open. There will be a test." –Claire Bateman, Scape

Karen Donovan’s anti-abecedarian epic, Aard-Vark to Axolotl, defamiliarizes definition while it defines it―a hieroglyphic reality, a Rosetta stone of acrobatic apocalyptic ellipses, an asemic semantics. These ancient and illustrious thumbnails strobe, groove out chasms of synaptic leaps. Each entry is an intaglio philatelic cornucopia from a Borgesian post-post office office, staffed by geometrically distorted Bletchley Park code-breakers and die cut Daedalus maze-builders staring at the event horizons of an encyclopedia full of collapsing suns. –Michael Martone, Michael Martone and Winesburg, Indiana

Aard-vark to Axolotl: prose poems, lyric essays, a postmodern bestiary? Who cares? Some works of literature, through the wonderful and unexpected collision of the imagination and the intellect end up defying classification and establishing a landscape where many different genres playfully mingle to create a new genre. Karen Donovan’s book is one of these collections. Intelligent, witty, and sometimes even lyrically moving, these pieces make us believe the unbelievable, and assure us, as the narrator of this book at one point says, “Whatever happens next is going to be good.” Actually, very, very good. –Peter Johnson, founder and editor of The Prose Poem: An International Journal and winner of the James Laughlin Award

Karen Donovan's ekphrastic commonplace book is a heartfelt, tricky collection of riffs on illustrations from an antique Webster's. Off these images Donovan bounces nostalgia and science, lust and learning, the domestic and the galactic, and then charts the resulting zigzags in lucid and lyrical near-essays, prose poems, lists, Oulipo games, and very short fictions. With a painter's eye, a comedian's sharp tongue, and a scientist's skepticism, she's rewritten the dictionary. "Words, words were what I needed," she tells us. Little did we know how much we needed hers. –Josh Russell, Yellow Jack and My Bright Midnight

About this edition

• Publisher: Etruscan Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0997745568
• ISBN 13: 9780997745566
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 107