Johan Jönson

The new press Displaced Press is publishing my translation of Johan Jönson's book Collobert Orbital, which is a kind of "translation" of Norma Cole's translation of Danielle Collobert's diaries (published by Litmus Press a few years ago). I just went through the proofs so it's about to be published. I'm very excited.

Johan is a strange literary case. He was published early on by a big press as a promising young poet type but then he was dropped and joined up with a strange performance troop in northern Sweden, Teatermaskinen (homage to Hamletmaskinen), which put on incredibly obscene, political spectacles. But now he's being published by both OEI and Bonnier (the biggest publisher in Sweden) and he seems to have gained a rather substantial readership (and a whole lot of haters).

Here is a youtube clip of a trailer by Teatermaskinen's piece Gransmaterial (Border Materials) (I'm pretty sure Johan wrote it):



Here are the blurbs for Collobert Orbital:

If Vicente Huidobro met Georges Bataille on a Waste Management(R)truck, the result might be something akin to Johan Jönsson's Collobert Orbital, the new manifesto of "the waste-disposal-working-class." At times soaring across "aerospatiality," at others existentially grounded in "an overheated world factory" of "all work, all healthcare, all logistics," Jönsson's linguistic propulsions and dynamic formal innovations challenge "a victorious bourgeois poetry order" to, once again, rearticulate verse experimentation to the politics and poetics of working a day job.

- Mark Novak


O R B I T A L

DNA bonanza contaminant reverie, target overhead. Flock to revelator gridded up to have no stake in history. See that their grave is kept clean. Fatalize wrong, upend amphetamachinic tort. Zero immunity. Cology — hyperplex mini flair, underalphabetic biodebt. Ssay. I couldn't remember the advanced memory formula. Dunno ergo soma. Autoquadrilateral & exogeneric, the transparencies regroup. Law intuition anything uncocked reason craters. Eco rad mono dead with note attached, incalculably inorganic property of the object continuity you just heard — the world, overtime. Mooniac, tricked-up torso love before discharges false dichotomies start stuttering. Ahysterical — swiftest closeup transplant nude spatiality. "To speak an ecstatic technology." The flattest are the busiest arterial munchies. Sextras: bend them over. Faster buckle conjure against choice as surrogate overheating extinction as obliteratable chew. Speed mash mouth lexicon amphetamaneuver. The goo goo amok, self torture broad-minded guts — interzonad gaffered all over you. Put tools in your face. Overdifferent anti-creamery daub up name. Existential logistics: a porous will, a rectal will suckling finality. Mutate epithet or no ending belowgistics. Buzzerless blisscharge, cuties with fists pry open your syllables. Cunnilanguage, cunnilanguish — hope, a surgical implant. Wishful stun: harmony is a warning where anything can breathe. Poppy, missile! Safe, natural, bombing run — victory post-mortem lab blubber. Difference gets you dead. Prey unwriting rumba complicity radio spook you white on white disgust. Whiteous coke on scalpel socialized ice cream. The larval class: vote yes. Cattle reward you, interzonked Fanonical swearing in cattle corporation. Dark retro, subtlety reverses it up the ass. Wage labor, context meltdowns. War — short term memory loss. You think about a lot of things when you're insoluble. Reptility: turn gold into cash. PEWS (Political Economy [of the] World System) refusal mash-up. Organize the slaves to vaporize hegemon. Any accident would be one ending.

- Bruce Andrews

[I like the fact that Andrews gave his blurb a title]