Poetry. Cross-Genre. Fiction. Drama. "It would take a miracle to perform this pageant. For a start, you would have to reanimate Charlotte Brontë, Adolf Loos, and Ronald Reagan, and you would need an ungodly amount of wax. Most of the action is obscene, and therefore takes place offstage. The actors enter and report on scenes of spectacular violence that go on all the time every day. The audience is part of the spectacle too. We are all transformed into images somewhere in this script. At one point, all of Hollywood appears onstage on the form of dead horses, perhaps because Hollywood film continues to rely on narrative conventions that it exhausted long ago. The entire world also appears, played by a boy who, in a series of rapid costume changes, puts on increasingly pretty dresses."—Aaron Kunin
Author City: South Bend, IN USA
Johannes Göransson was born and raised in Skåne, Sweden, but has lived in the US for many years. He co-edits Action Books with Joyelle McSweeney and co-edits the online journal Action, Yes with John Dermot Woods. Göransson has translated the work of Aase Berg, Henry Parland, Ann Jaderlund, Johan Jönson and other Swedish and Finland Swedish poets. He is the author of ENTRANCE TO A COLONIAL PAGEANT IN WHICH WE ALL BEGIN TO INTRICATE (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2011), DEAR RA (A STORY IN FLINCHES) (Starcherone Books, 2008), PILOT (JOHANN THE CAROUSEL HORSE) (Fairy Tale Review Press, 2008), and A NEW QUARANTINE WILL TAKE MY PLACE (Apostrophe Books, 2007). He teaches at the University of Notre Dame.
Reviews and Other Links
author blog
interview by Blake Butler @ HTMLGIANT
Johannes Göransson interviewed by SJ Fowler @ 3:AM Magazine
“I don’t know where else you could contract the plague in these words but by ten TVs at once. On the TVs play: Salo, the weather channel, 2x Fassbinder (any), Family Double Dare, ads for ground beef, blurry surgical recordings, porno, porno, Anger (all). An 11th TV right behind you will show you yourself reading to the backside of your head. You’ll need a machine gun and a body double. You will not feel your disease: as here these words bring such high pleasure: this malaria is fun. It’s also fidgety, petrifying, elegantly rash, giddy, stunned. Burroughs and Genet and ’Pac are dead. Long live Göransson.”
—Blake Butler
“Voluptuous, turbulent, and focused, inventive and strictly faithful to the performative instability of our queer moment, Johannes Göransson’s new book brings page and stage together in order to put genre (and gender) to a series of ongoing tests. Here body and body of work (inextricable) are in a critical condition: subject to an invasive and relentless interpretation producing excessive, unruly ‘truths.’ Here the debased coin of feeling is rung hard and the ‘Authenticity kitsch’ of an easily accepted idea of the poetic is returned for a better metal, mined from a deeper vein. The love child—in this book at least—of Sylvia Plath and Antonin Artaud (if one can assign parentage at the end of an orgy?), Göransson gives us realisms complicated and fast enough to believe in. ENTRANCE TO A COLONIAL PAGEANT IN WHICH WE ALL BEGIN TO INTRICATE is an immensely important and absolutely thrilling experience. Read this! ‘Something tells me he is the poet of social justice. Peekaboo!’”
—Laura Mullen