Dear Ra

You can now order Dear Ra from Starcherone here. But it won't be officially released until October.

Dear Ra is a strange book for me. I wrote it a long time ago - mostly during the first Bush campaign in 2000, and in the wake of numerous botched relationships in Iowa. It's so paranoid and furious and pell-mell, I hardly recognize myself. I thought the world was coming to an end (and I was sort of right).

Here is the text from the page (if you are too lazy to click):

In Dear Ra, and indeterminate text comprised of letters, resembling both fiction and poetry but not wholly comfortable in either category, if the task is to wake up the language, each sentence answers the challenge, stabbing at one like a beautiful murderer.

"In DEAR RA, we are told, among many other things, that 'narrative equals death.' If that is so, then Johannes Göransson's 21st-century epistolary novel is very much alive, as it bobs and weaves through the mundane details and arcane allusions of our culture, filled with feints and jabs in all directions, warding off the threat of premature closure. DEAR RA is sharp, funny, morbid, and deliriously (re)readable."
- Steven Shaviro, author of The Cinematic Body and Connected

"Love letters. Love poetry. Like this: 'You know how I love it when you don't make sense. But most of all I love the way you whimper when your pants are down. So much for Petrarch,' the Italian poet praising his Laura in sonnets. Johannes Göransson's letters to an ex-lover Ra -- as well as the letters in this book to the radiator, history, Susan Sontag, America, poetry itself--come from a poet whose 'heart [and poetics] belongs to a drive-by shooting.' Reading them is to be invited into the theater of utterly mixed metaphors where nothing follows; which is to say, a theater of memory where everything can follow: an amazing high-wire act of body and soul, language and thought where 'even the circus gets eaten alive.'"
- Steve Tomasula, author of Vas and The Book of Portraiture

"Solarity's always about empire, sort of. Johannes Göransson's delerious letters to the Egyptian sun God are definitely in America, somewhere between Frank O'Hara's Mayakovsky and Georges Bataille's Vincent Van Gogh. 'I can't jack off without history peering in,' he writes. Me neither."
- Ariana Reines, author of The Cow

Contact: Ted Pelton, Editor, Starcherone Books, P.O. Box 303, Buffalo, NY 14201
Phone: 716-885-2726. Fax: 716-884-0291. E-mail: ted@starcherone.com
PUBLICATIONDATE: October 1, 2008
PRICE: $16.00; 96 pp
ISBN-13: 978-0-9788811-2-2; ISBN-10: 0-9788811-2-5