Poetry. PALACE OF REPTILES is a dance and a ritual conducted in language, a plumbing and sounding-out of buried histories and vocabularies. Ranging from the brief and beautiful "Ellen's Lament" to the central long poem "Doubtless," the eight poems of this book touch on multiple genres (elegy, celebration, performance art, poetics talk) in order to transform them.
"O'Sullivan's poems are acrostic spells from a half-known language—old and almost forgotten, new and still being learned. They are steps in a contrarian dance, quarter notes in a songering, pianissimos in a lulla, white pages stained with thrown talk. Here, in PALACE OF REPTILES, language is fast, both as returning and as setting-out. To begin, strap yourself in: then, open the book and let yourself go."—Pete Smith
Author City: Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire UK
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Peter Manson