It Had Been a Long Exorcism

✍ Scribed by Stefan White

• Year: 2022
• Tongue: English
• Edition: 1
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

Relentless, intense, funny, deeply personal, angry and vividly magical sadness from an era of terror and error, these involuted, bleeding poems are redeemed by their freedom, by the exultant play with language, by the splatter-painting of odd portraits and the feathered symmetry of the symbolic electricity.

This poetry is as easy to read as water is to drink—if the water in question were made of a gibbering stream of images which transformed your throat as they bustled down into your stomach, turning every surface of your insides into many cinema screens all playing different films of the same strange self.

The author coughs, pushes up his glasses, and begins to speechify in a voice so nasal it sticks. “Here it is, my slow-cooked collection of squalid and haunted poems about what is so far the worst period of my life: the end of a manic mismarriage and its aftermath, when, having just turned 30, I finally ended up alone with myself, with time to think about who I was and why I’d landed there. But although this book is a scream of pain, it is one with elaborate stylings and fully-realized rooms; it is an ornate palace of wailing, a metropolis of painstakingly articulated discombobulation whose acerbic bitterness flows over and leaps up into a flight of creation, a limber hymn to making something that doesn’t exist, to putting into gilded words that which is here so briefly and soon will be gone—myself. But there’s also the laughter, if somewhat mocking, that rings through the halls of the stanzas, for in the end, I have always thawed my frozen soul with the scorching jewel of art, the merry fire of the good line, the phrasing that somersaults and lands on its hands, burning right.

Who should read this? Dusty people, perhaps. Twilight people, dawn bats, elephants in musth, road signs in the middle of the desert, people who walk their dogs alone on Friday night, unemployed executioners, cynical kittens, bored gods, those who gambled their lives and lost, winners whose winnings mean nothing, headless presidents, everyone who is meatless, boneless, and fleshless, everyone ingrown and outgrown and overgrown and undergrown. Everybody who’s me and the hundreds that are you. I rate this book four out of five full moons and nine out of ten grenades. I should be selling it for trillions of dollars and vials of blood from the beautiful and young—but I feel generous today, so I’ll give it to you for free. Aren’t I kind?”