THE HOUSE THAT HIJACK BUILT
"i am a caesuricide bomber; of ruptures, gas(s)ps, absences/ explosions. a tsuriside bomber of psycho-social upheaval, a sluicide bomber... a Seusside bomber." A set of rapid-fire macabre puns—playing on poetic breaks, the Yiddish word for trouble, a slippery chute and a children's book author—form just one instance of Karasick's determined, and often erotic, deconstruction of all pieties, here centered on 9/11 and continuing conflict in the Middle East. Whether through sheer exuberance or audacity, the New York–based Karasick (consistently published by Canada's Talonbooks) somehow makes, for example, the act of juxtaposing "...and also permit me to assure you that coming again is not as pleasant as coming" with a child's drawing of the second plane hitting the south tower meaningful, drawing out violence's incomprehensibility, absurdity and possibly twisted erotic charge (for its perpetrators). Most of the book proceeds in that fashion, down to its method of composition: Karasick works from the Sefer Yetzirah, the book of the Kabbalah known as the Book of Letters, for which she substitutes liberally. Perhaps the strangest, most irreverent and utterly shameless of possible responses to a tragedy, Karasick's is also, finally, deeply and compellingly human. (Sept.)
