Mike Thorn reviews Avatar: The Way of Water for In Review Online

“If The Way of Water is a crucial work of tech Romanticism, then another of its richest central dissonances is that between past and future: it imagines a world that stands a chance against modernity’s most brutal and oppressive machinations, thus situating itself in the past, but it also uses its genre modality to speculate a future that exceeds postmodernity’s politically flattening failures.”

Read the full review.

Josiah Morgan’s Circles Pushes Boundaries

With the 2019 release of Inside the Castle, Josiah Morgan announced himself as a transgressive and exciting new voice, and Circles is further evidence. A freewheeling blur of poetry, film criticism, and visual art, Morgan’s latest work urges its readers to question what defines a text, and even what it means to read. Morgan pursues these complex problems through the attentive and varied use of typography, offering a mixture of blank-verse, concrete poetry, and essay fragments that gesture to the book’s title shape and its implications of auto-cannibalism and endlessness.

The content is as fascinating and rebellious as the form. Morgan draws on disparate media, religious references, and allusions both coded and explicit (I was particularly pleased to see one of my favorite lines from Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” and a reading of the vegan ethos in Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre). The author lays bare his frame of references in an appendix labeled ASSISTANCE [IN RESEARCH AND ERASURE], and his array of sources is fascinating and unique.

The result is not nearly as daunting or unapproachable as it might sound. In fact, I easily devoured the book in one quick sitting. Morgan’s work is energizing, animated by a vital and authentic voice, threaded with both coldly ironic observation and real despair. The author engages in some hilarious interplay between artificial designations of “high” and “low” art. Consider, for example, a prose-poem near the end of the book that describes a speaker masturbating to urolagniac fantasies of shock-punk icon GG Allin before reading Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Plath.

Much like Morgan’s excellent Inside the CastleCircles is a powerful testament to this brilliant young writer’s talent. Keep your eyes on him.

Beyond Empowertainment: Feminist Horror and the Struggle for Agency

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Coming October 31 from The Seventh Row: Beyond Empowertainment: Feminist Horror and the Struggle for AgencyDiscover some of the best female-centred horror films of the decade and how they’re pushing the genre forward.

The collection features Mike Thorn’s essay “‘No Desire If It’s Not Forbidden’: Dread, Eroticism, and Text Messaging in Personal Shopper,” an interview with Personal Shopper director Olivier Assayas, and contributions by Orla Smith, Elena Lazic, and Mary Angela Rowe, among others.

 

 

 

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