A Thousand Devils

by K. Silem Mohammad

Poetry. "If an ancient had an epileptic seizure, he was possessed by a thousand devils. When he regained consciousness, the devils were driven out by a healer. The devils had to go someplace. In this case they have gone into the poems.The poems roar or whisper balefully from the sand or from the wind, or stir unseen in the coiling silence; or fall from the heavens like crushing incubi.With their dismal fooleries they trasform our worthless days and disentagle a thousand evils, and they are indeed, incredible"-Nada Gordon. "Toward some crooked vein of empathy/ A subsong marries its twin in Can there be a code joined to right or ruth/ Adequately, this star-freaked wide isthmus?" -from "The Lollard's Remonstrance."

Genres: Poetry

98 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

K. Silem Mohammad is the author of Deer Head Nation (Tougher Disguises, 2003), A Thousand Devils (Combo Books, 2004), Breathalyzer (Edge Books, 2008), and The Front (Roof Books, 2009). His poetry has been published in numerous journals and anthologies. He is co-editor (with Richard Greene) of the essay collections The Undead and Philosophy: Chicken Soup for the Soulless (Open Court, 2006) and Quentin Tarantino and Philosophy: How to Philosophize with a Pair of Pliers and a Blowtorch (Open Court, 2007). Mohammad edits the poetry journal Abraham Lincoln with Anne Boyer.

Reviews

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Thousand Devils reminds me a little of Oakland: it’d be a beautiful city if San Francisco fell into the sea. Coming as it does between the thick fragmentary rhetoric of Hovercraft and brilliant voicings of Deer Head Nation, it's tempting to read the work here as transitional. Friends, put that Satan behind you. A Thousand Devils has pleasures and bounce enough of its own to infest your canals for a lifetime.

[Joy]

This the second book in the Dresden Detective series and is set after the Dresden bombing and the end of the war during the Russian occupation. It paints as grim a picture as the first book, The Air Raid Killer, but again it moves along and you want to find out who the killer is. Heller is just as driven and resolute as before but still retains his humanity in hellish surroundings.