It is a rare privilege to recognize just how one is idiotic, how idiotic one is, the howness of this state and how it’s interwoven with anything one might call one’s intelligence.
Idiocy, Ltd. is now available. You do need a copy.
Some readers:
Whether its smoking giraffes, Florida-style rehabilitation, or the oddities of a whole cast of characters in Taipei, Eric Mader shows a sure hand in balancing satire, spoof, and twilight-zone weird, revealing hints of Kafka, Borges, and other worthies, but with a spirit all his own. With its riotous absurdity, its jarring changes of register, and its underlying critical but humane tone, Idiocy, Ltd. will make you laugh and, more important, make you think.
National Taiwan University
Unpredictability is Mader’s stock in trade . . . an endlessly fascinating eccentric.
The best of these poems surprise us not with a flashy detail, but an image or an abstraction we somehow knew was right around the corner. In the most imaginative moments, where the poems are surprised by translation across language and culture, we are playfully and seriously moved to open our eyes wider and our ears to hear the delight of words.
of the 2014 New Criterion Poetry Prize
More:
BOOKISH ASIA has posted a review by Prof. Hugh Hochman of Reed College. A scholar of 20th-century literature, Hochman raises some of the questions that most interest me, especially that of genre.
Idiocy, Ltd. is now available in a Chinese edition published by Comma Books. See: 白痴有限公司 Launch Party.
Also of interest may be Letter to a Young Prose Poet, on the roles Max Jacob and Daniil Kharms played in getting me into this fix. See also: Idiocy, Ltd. / 白痴有限公司 and Why I Love the Prose Poem.
Check out Idiocy, Ltd. Dryest damn prose in the West.
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