cover image MICROCLIMATES

MICROCLIMATES

Taylor Brady, . . Krupskaya, $9 (164pp) ISBN 978-1-928650-09-6

Thick descriptions of postmodern experiential dilemmas—consciousness as it undergoes the suburbs, drugs, public art, for instance—form the core of Brady's first book, mostly in prose. Victorian syntactical structures guide elaborate clause constellations that profess their connections rhetorically, while logically demonstrating otherwise, making for a swirl of microclimatic contingency. Such sentential, Deleuzian bait-and-switches are reproduced at a larger level as well, since the book as a whole also drifts thematically from riots in Florida, to the status of the "mark" in poststructuralism, to Sun Ra, to Melville: "We call these bluffs. We pass them during bus rides./ Or buttes called outriders. Called out as pastimes,/ each segment calling out the line. Call it out of line." Though Brady deploys a range of quasi-allegorical characters with names like Auntie Terrible, Birdy, Mr. Article, Uncle Madame and Dr. Duplex, they consistently resist conventional characterization, providing instead a kind of nominal social situation, someone around ("No one here but me and my speech impediment") to mimic the logic of social and epistemological situations in which the speaker's consciousness, and less frequently his body, find themselves operating: "well, I guess you had to be there. Being there, you had but to clap your hands and people, trees, poured concrete would flash into being alongside you." There are elements of the bildungsroman, filtered through rock music (stadium and otherwise) and popular drug culture, with the suffering of others reduced to an inarticulate procession of images, one where "the mother in the public service spot wipes thick, ropy slobber from the chin of her brain-damaged, gas-huffing son, who rocks with unspeakable, mute visions." At times the disjunctions and catastrophes become almost formulaic ("I think your aunt just finished drowning in another room"), but the blank terror and torrential dataflow of this book, with their dysfunctional colonization of the speaker's mind and agency, make for a devastating, mockingly baroque critique of current modes of communication. (July)