Joey Madia, New Mystics Reviews

“For the Page as well as the Stage”: A Review of The Blood of Squirrels , a play by Gabriel Rosenstock (Dublin: Original Writing Ltd, 2012), ISBN: 978-1-909007-12-3 Some days, it is splendid to be a reviewer. Most days, honestly. But the days when a little gift is delivered to my email in-box in the form of a book—or a play—that is in need of some attention, some publicity… those are the best for me. Of the nearly 200 reviews I have written, roughly 180 of them are of fiction and nonfiction books. I have also reviewed music and videos. And also some plays. Plays are interesting to review. An argument is often made that teaching Shakespeare as literature instead of theatre is detrimental. Well, of course you are missing the performance element, which is what the plays were expressly written for… but more people have probably read those plays than seen them, so overall it’s been helpful. And here we are, five months into the pandemic, with Broadway shut down until a...

(Beneath the Underground, 2005, $45.00) Improvisations is a scary big book. At 700 pages it is far afield from your typically slim volume of poetry. Frazer uses the length and breadth of this master-work to cover an immense amount of typographical and etymological ground, and he has the freedom to repeat a variety of themes for emphasis and effect. At times the passages are so slightly, subtly revised as to be almost unnoticed. But the structure here is akin to Pollock’s drip paintings or the works of East Coast wordsmith Marc Sonnenfeld—Frazer “denies the accident” and one gets the sense that moving one word, one symbol, one line would collapse the entire structure. It took me nine and a half months to read Improvisations, taking it in as I did in manageable, well-considered doses, like the potent intoxicant that it is. Not since I read Bob Dylan’s Tarantula many years ago have I felt so overwhelmed by the sheer volume of words. I hold the distinction of being the first person to buy ...