Nemo (New American Fiction) - Softcover

Vangelisti, Paul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1557132275 ISBN 13: 9781557132277

Publisher: Sun & Moon Press, 2000

Synopsis

In this new fiction-poem by Los Angeles poet and publisher Paul Vangelisti, the author has created what he describes as "a log of a voyage in the direction of a sentence." The log began as a daily and habitual attempt to exclude and include the world around him while he was living on an NEA grant. But before long, Vangelisti's nemesis, "the good captain," aka Nemo, took possession of his sentences, and the author, incorporating them, was forced to struggle to discover/recover his own identity. The result is an hilarious and irreverent view of the world as experienced through the skewed and distorted lens of a slightly crazed mind peering through a Los Angeles window. "As the Captain says, 'Ain't no lilacs in this dooryard.'"

About this title

About the Author:

Paul Vangelisti is editor of Ribot magazine.

From Publishers Weekly:

This incessant effort to wring interesting language out of a pointedly banal and disaffected activity-looking out a window on to a residential street in Los Angeles-is never anything more than futile, however proudly so. Although Vangelisti-an important publishing figure on the West coast and co-founder of Invisible City/Red Hills Press and a veteran poet-seems to vie for the nonchalant, demotic poesis of Ron Silliman or Bob Perelman, this fiction-poem pictures him as an indolent neighbor ("living on an NEA grant," the publisher notes) waiting for something to walk by. Nemo, which consists of a single text, playfully deploys sentences and sentence fragments but manages to do no more than conjure a "Captain" persona who chides the narrator, rather archly, about his window-box perspective. One question is posed: "What's twenty feet off the ground looking downtown at a ridge of palms and two-thirds of a skyline." We know the answer.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Sun & Moon Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1557132275
• ISBN 13: 9781557132277
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 88