Foreman, founder of the avant-garde Ontological-Hysteric Theater in New York City and a six-time Obie winner, offers a first collection of cryptic, playful, deeply weird tales.
Dense as any poem by Wallace Stevens, these six stories offer echoes of the work of Donald Barthelme, Antonin Artaud, Gertrude Stein, William Burroughs, and Samuel Beckett, among others. Many will call it babble as their minds bobble. Bedazzled Foremanians will love it. And still others, tiring of baubles and disapproving of disjunctive sentences that wind left, right, up, down, may simply yawn. Only the most devoted need enter here, those willing to assemble from lyrical fragments some semblance of a tale. For instance, "Eddie," the first tale, tells us that "Eddie went to Poetry City and there, on one of the major boulevards, met Marie. . . Eddie, like a river, flowed through Poetry City. Reading nothing but signs, and not even reading the signs. . . Eddie went to Poetry City. The light there was the light now. The now." It pretty much goes on that way, long past the point where Foreman's rhythmic language can compel. These pieces, it quickly becomes clear, are pitched below the level of logic, aiming for something (but what?) other than a tale. "The Mind King," a parable about (perhaps) the superego, is wildly disorienting. And that seems to be the whole point: To send the reader down into the unconscious, where one may see anew. "And the past fell away like ice cream into soup," the author tells us in "The Amateur Genius," an inspired antistory that toys with the nature of genius—is it a city in flames? "The Suburbanite" locates his house "through memory, through precognition, all things that played through his fingers like the piano that disappeared because who could see through walls?"
Cockeyed, sometimes mind-expanding visions. More often, baffling, irritating, and exhausting.
