Fiction. Jayson and Molly live together. Their relationship is on the rocks, due in part to Jayson's representation of Molly in a novel he wrote and which made a lot of money. She is going to break up with him. But before she can Jayson goes off to write poems in a Thomas Kinkade gallery where he is murdered. Who killed Jayson? Who had motive and access? The premise behind INVERTED CURVATURES is that detective novels and romance novels work with opposing narrative curvatures. In a detective novel, the body is found and the intentions come last. In a romance the intention to love comes first and the body of that love is the conclusion to that story. INVERTED CURVATURES brings these two narrative curves together in San Francisco using a poet, a philosophical consultant, and a model. Through these characters (and through a comparison of the artworks of Thomas Kinkade and Mark Tansey), the arc of American society is shown not from a chronological perspective but from an analogical perspective which ultimately questions the nature of representation and identity.

Author City: WASHINGTON, DC USA

Francis Raven is a Washington, D.C., based poet whose books include the volumes of poetry ARCHITECTONIC CONJECTURES: POEMS ABOUT THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT (Silenced Press, 2010), Provisions (Interbirth, 2009), Shifting the Question More Complicated (Otoliths, 2007) and Taste: Gastronomic Poems (Blazevox, 2005), as well as the novel INVERTED CURVATURES (Spuyten Duyvil, 2005). Her poems have been published in Bath House, CHAIN, Big Bridge, Bird Dog, Mudlark, Caffeine Destiny, and Spindrift, among others, and her critical work can be found in Jacket, Logos, Clamor, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, The Electronic Book Review, The Emergency Almanac, The Morning News, The Brooklyn Rail, 5 Trope, In These Times, The Fulcrum Annual, Rain Taxi, and Flak.

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