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December 6th, 2012 / 12:11 pm
 Author Spotlight & I Like __ A Lot

Have you read Andrea Rexilius?

I don’t recall how I came across Andrea Rexilius’s “excerpt from New Organism,” published at this rad looking journal called Timber, but I’m glad I did.

At first glance I saw the word “séance,” which instantly transported me back more than a decade, to a time when I had the privilege of studying séances and mirror gazing and other such wonders with Dr. Raymond Moody (the guy who invented the phrase “near death experience”) at the Consciousness Studies Center at UNLV. But that’s a whole other story. What matters here is that Rexilius got my attention. So I eagerly read her excerpt and was so impressed I felt compelled to look for more of her work.

Here is a passage from that excerpt:

A séance functions as a perception. A stone feels like a dream. Imagine a dream with the weight of a stone or try in your dream to become a stone. A stone breathes and a stone becomes and a stone is perception traveling. I sleep with a stone in my ear. I listen to what the stone says. This is a séance. A stone may hold some ghosts. I used to say a tree would be a good place for a ghost to live and that all allergies were the result of ghosts in the body. Put your body ghosts in trees and eat wheat again, eat nuts and milk and put your ghosts to rest. Take refuge in the newly revived heart, and stomach, and liver. There is no shame in loving a ghost, or in dreaming as a stone dreams, with shifty eyes, like vessels cut open by the scalpel, like a drowning man in flight beneath the water, like a body ghost loving a tree ghost loving a person.

Turns out, she’s got two books.  Half of What They Carried Flew Away (Letter Machine Editions, 2012) and To Be Human Is to Be a Conversation (Rescue Press, 2011).

Can’t wait to read them.

Also, Olivia Cronk interviewed her about the earlier book over at Bookslut, and it’s well worth checking out: she has a bunch of interesting things to say, such as: “the new is often monstrous or ugly because it is new or because we don’t know how to look at / respond to / interact with it yet. This also suggests that we will, that it isn’t impossible or “difficult.” And personally I would rather gaze into the eyes of Frankenstein than Hayden Christensen any day.”

UPDATE: Letter Machine Editions is offering a deal on Half of What They Carried…get it along books by Peter Gizzi & Juliana Leslie–all three for $35