Bøger af Mike Corrao

In The Persimmon is an Event Mike Corrao explores the yet-to-be-created field of Ovidian Dynamics (a study of the body's metamorphic potentials) as the reader / subject undergoes a series of unwieldy changes.

Two patrons appear in a dim cafe one day. How they've arrived, where they've come from, and why they're there at all, they have no idea. What they do know is that they hate one another. Mike Corrao has with Man, Oh Man masterly crafted a humorous yet insightful experiment that'll have you questioning how you've always approached novels.

-mancer is a yellow phonebook for a familiar but improbable parallel civilization... it is a history as surmised by an artificial intelligence. Mike Corrao's second book with Inside the Castle.

Desert Tiles brings a fresh spin on the "Corraoesque" theme of text / image coming "alive", becoming a "semiotic organism," undertaken here via the twin metaphors of text as a desert and reading as necromancy. The desert here is both literal (as the ever-shifting "dune-script" of meaning) and a place "deserted", a place of the always-already absent voice, into which the reader is invited to venture out. Reading as necromancy entails summoning the voice of the absent/"dead" author, communing with the past action(s) of signification and by decoding it, yielding messages for (some kind of) the future."Read this geometry in such a way as to allow the text unit increment itself to be unbounded, allowing for fragments of itself to be discorporated in such a way as to interlock-in voxelized gradient-with vacancies identical to those fragments excised from the primary corpus of the text unit itself in such a way as to be both of itself and containing another, like a splinter of bone healing into liver tissue."-John Trefry, author of Plats"Mike Corrao's Desert Tiles takes an ekphrastic approach to our probable swallow by ocular data. The writer/reader is in a state of pixelated becoming. There is no what it/we/they become(s), nor how, nor why, even - a barely-where "textures are compressed and corrupted" and a barely-who "hums their jaw against the sand." Something is in process of being downloaded, devoured, dissolved. It's icky, because it's true. What happens when the happening is pure mechanics, an I thinking and therefore (without reason). As the body is desertified, the body-esque remains: a fine-grained graphic that "yawns and weeps" even while you (the body? Or body-esque?) "want to cry, but are incapable." In the poem "you ask yourself if this still counts as lived experience," while IRL you are wondering if you count as something R and L? Or "is its not being real really that important?" A proper noun believes in something, like the moon landing, or politics, or that 7up & saltines will cure a stomachache. "The static speaks to me." Poor robots, I think, poor tin man. A heart and blood are black and white and indexed quietly, and the index beats. Who will read all the indexes left behind, desiring their un-deserted world? One might desire the desert. Liking the gray sand. And then what."-MJ Gette, author of The Walls They Left Us"Set in a desert created by a 'borgesian deity,' a wandering 'wastrel-form' encounters a Necromancer. This isn't the Desert of the Real, but a literary simulacrum where wanderer and Mancer engage in a dance of death (or birth)? Corrao reveals a book giving birth to itself, not as a postmodernist contrivance, but as a slow-paced prose poem. Body horror collides with a kind of digital mysticism. With both words and images, we witness a sky the color of TV tuned to a dead channel and the birth of the new flesh."-Driftless Area Review

"Fully exploiting the Gogolesque conceit of a cephalophore whose body and head go their own separate ways, Cephalonegativity reads like Beckett's Play (with M reprised as an even more slippery version of himself) or Not I as if performed by the secret society of Acéphale. Archaic turns of phrase and elision combine with post-cinematic headlessness to produce a stage play that plays with stages and stages play, a lesescenario from the velveteen tongue of an heretical zealot, its phrases as if slurped up off an abattoir floor, or off the rotted walls of a theatre-cum-poisoned-amniotic-sac where the performers have all become kuroko. Read out loud, at speed, in honour of its progenitors, the words turn into "chunks of hot pomegranate meat" in your mouth-turned-anus, with your gills agape, your mutinous soma exsanguinated, levitating above you, your head on fire singing like litel clergeon from the catacombs."-¿Gary J. Shipley, author of 30 Fake Beheadings"In pursuing a theatrical treatment of the Self's head and body and self-selves, through a Bataillean notion of headlessness, through typographical humor and rupture, through a Dada-esque document of volatile mirror-pages and chorus, Cephalonegativity makes of itself a gaping gesture: a neck-stub that is a mouth that is singing out and commenting on the ritual of being present. The reader dials in via "a rotary anus" and watches a body hanging as a tail in its coprolalic spooky plastic underwater gloom psychedelia cum outer space inside of a mouth cum cult orgy. "DO/ YOU SEE THE END OF TIME? THE APPROACHING/ WALL? WHEN THE THEATRICAL BECOMES THE/ APOCALYPTIC? ENACTING A DISTORTED REALI-/ TY AS THIN LAYERS OVER THIS ONE?" This text is a porous fabric through which we might perform the wound of the stage as we watch it rot."-¿Olivia Cronk, author of Womonster¿