What do you think?
Rate this book
Intention Implication Wind
About the After Chappy leaves home, Mirror falls off the house and comes to an important decision about her future and the future of the owl-eyed boy. On her subsequent journey, Mirror hears a voice like a can opener opening a can of trumpets. Read this book and you will start to hear sounds other people don't hear. Sounds locked deep inside walls, stirring to get out. Sounds in the chests of the people you pass in parks. Sounds deep under the ground, where darkness covers men skinned in humid walls, clambering in endless circles, looping endlessly back on themselves, till they turn their ways of being inside-out.
392 pages, Paperback
First published May 28, 2011
12 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 8, 2011
I read it very slowly. Because every time I read it, it was startling. And I wanted it to continue to be startling. I didn't want to ever take it for granted. I had to read it like it was - as it was written. So it could keep on being startling. It was always being startling to me. That was quite important. It was beautiful and startling. And startlingly beautiful.
Things would just come out of it. Poetry. Very meaningful. Nested there. Growing out of it like flowers break through concrete. Which defined and superseded it. Like fish jumping out of rivers. The sun glinting briefly off their skin. Eyes flashing. Mouths trying to breathe air. Incongruous and perfect. Reminding us. And making evident the space around us, between us, and within. A brilliance that shimmers briefly in banality, but registers most deeply thereby. Like something unexpectedly you see caught up in the wind. It blows away before you can get ahold of it. You’re left grasping for it, only catching hold of empty traces of it, which remain full of imminent meaning. Until it turns into something else.
There is a story there. I would be inclined in one way to say that it is told impressionistically. I would be inclined in another way to say that it is told like cubism does portraits. I would be inclined in another way to say that it's just like any story told: the sense of it is aggregate. The characters and things that happen and the feelings everybody has, and the perceptions, all become evident in complex contradictory ways over time. Repetition. Like relationships. Thinking, or knowing, that it is something whole, even though each part rests easy on its own.
There is a story there. But more than a story, there is writing there. There are sentences and paragraphs the like of which i've only read in few, very few, writers. It does stand out. This is literature as an art form.
One of the very few books I will return to, to continue to read and be inspired by.
Things would just come out of it. Poetry. Very meaningful. Nested there. Growing out of it like flowers break through concrete. Which defined and superseded it. Like fish jumping out of rivers. The sun glinting briefly off their skin. Eyes flashing. Mouths trying to breathe air. Incongruous and perfect. Reminding us. And making evident the space around us, between us, and within. A brilliance that shimmers briefly in banality, but registers most deeply thereby. Like something unexpectedly you see caught up in the wind. It blows away before you can get ahold of it. You’re left grasping for it, only catching hold of empty traces of it, which remain full of imminent meaning. Until it turns into something else.
There is a story there. I would be inclined in one way to say that it is told impressionistically. I would be inclined in another way to say that it is told like cubism does portraits. I would be inclined in another way to say that it's just like any story told: the sense of it is aggregate. The characters and things that happen and the feelings everybody has, and the perceptions, all become evident in complex contradictory ways over time. Repetition. Like relationships. Thinking, or knowing, that it is something whole, even though each part rests easy on its own.
There is a story there. But more than a story, there is writing there. There are sentences and paragraphs the like of which i've only read in few, very few, writers. It does stand out. This is literature as an art form.
One of the very few books I will return to, to continue to read and be inspired by.
June 15, 2011
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
This is the latest release by our friends at Canadian small press Pedlar, and unfortunately the first title of theirs that I found myself not so fond of, which can mostly be chalked up to the nature of experimentalism in general; because while the exact perfect amount of abstraction and poetry in a title like this is what makes one of them so great, much like most of the other Pedlar titles I've read, just the tiniest amount more or in the wrong direction can make the whole thing fall apart at the seams. And that's simply the nature of cutting-edge work, why it's called cutting-edge to begin with, and why so relatively few writers even attempt such a style; because not only is there objectively only a tiny window that constitutes a success with experimental stories, but with that window changing locations from one individual reader to the next too, so that one person may love a project for the exact reasons another may intensely dislike it. It's still recommended to adventurous readers in this spirit, in the hopes that all its elements may deeply click with you; but in my particular case, I found Intention Implication Wind to be just a little too scattershot for my tastes, more a case of abstract poetry written in a prose form than a narrative tale written with a poetic sensibility.
Out of 10: 7.4
This is the latest release by our friends at Canadian small press Pedlar, and unfortunately the first title of theirs that I found myself not so fond of, which can mostly be chalked up to the nature of experimentalism in general; because while the exact perfect amount of abstraction and poetry in a title like this is what makes one of them so great, much like most of the other Pedlar titles I've read, just the tiniest amount more or in the wrong direction can make the whole thing fall apart at the seams. And that's simply the nature of cutting-edge work, why it's called cutting-edge to begin with, and why so relatively few writers even attempt such a style; because not only is there objectively only a tiny window that constitutes a success with experimental stories, but with that window changing locations from one individual reader to the next too, so that one person may love a project for the exact reasons another may intensely dislike it. It's still recommended to adventurous readers in this spirit, in the hopes that all its elements may deeply click with you; but in my particular case, I found Intention Implication Wind to be just a little too scattershot for my tastes, more a case of abstract poetry written in a prose form than a narrative tale written with a poetic sensibility.
Out of 10: 7.4
September 11, 2011
I was astounded by this book. Review forthcoming in The Collagist.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews