Rosary (or, les fleurs du mala) - Matthew Remski - Bog

A rosary of personal, ethnographic, and psycho-somatic prayer-poems that peer into the nature of consciousness. It fetishizes bead-and-string technology as the foundational mechanism for multiple disciplines of inquiry: linguistics, astronomy, sexology, and computing. At the very centre of everything we do, this serial work claims, is a sequence of ones and zeroes that constitute the repetitive and immutable chant of the cosmos. The work is self-referential, holding the structure of a prayer-session through its beaded episodes, but offering a broken and heterodox content that attempts to mirror the sublime ambivalences of evolving complexity. It employs the technique of prayer to subvert old notions of prayer, and reorient devotion towards the horizontal and the changing. The personal themes of speak to multiple conversions, metaphysical and continental wandering, east-west conflict and dialogue, and the growing realization that this flesh, handling these words, beads, and pages, underlies all meaning, value, and love. "Bound together by devotion, wildness, and long practice, this string of pages tells several winding stories: child to adult to father, Catholic to Buddhist to open-source mystic, believer to skeptic, seeker, teacher. With a punster's joy in wordplay, Remski spins a fantasia of ancient ritual and childhood prayer, premodern numerology and postmodern science that opens in unexpected directions-just as you think you've got it. Funnier (and sexier) than you'd expect, and more wise, read it in a single sitting, letting go into the strange oscillation of cosmic and mundane, and yes, birth and death, that pulses here." - Sean Feit