Welcome to Johannes Goransson’s “private genocide,” ground zero for figurative language. Put on your best pig smile and meet the gratuitous martyrs, Kublai Khan, Colin Powell, the jackle-hearted masses, Herman Melville, Egyptian dogs, and the Coca-Cola Cowboys. They’re all in the burning barn at the Big Dance where the Ballad of the Pig Circus plays like a torso full of “October of birds.” Beauty becomes “a riddle doused in gasoline” in this Postmodern epic that mixes surrealist impulses with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E-esqe prosody. Notions of genre are demolished and language itself seems relegated to a wildly impossible epistemological space that is something akin to “whispering in hammers” or “speaking in silhouettes.” If this sounds confusing, don’t worry, the poet has sewn it all together with a “travesty of stitches,” and he has “left his body inside the allegory.” The poet satirizes, prods, pastiches, and “grotesquerizes” until every assumption we have, cultural or personal, crumbles in a bizarre and re-invented idiom.
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