Mira Corpora

by Jeff Jackson

Mira Corpora is the debut novel from acclaimed playwright Jeff Jackson. It's a coming-of-age story for people who hate coming-of-age stories. A journey across a shifting dreamlike landscape, featuring feral children, teenage oracles, mysterious cassette tapes, and a reclusive underground rockstar.

With astounding precision, Jackson weaves a moving tale of discovery and mad hope across a startling, vibrant landscape.

Genres: Fiction, American, Coming Of Age, Literary Fiction, Novels, Dark, American Fiction

182 pages, Paperback

First published September 24, 2013

About the author

Jeff Jackson's "Destroy All Monsters" was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in Fall 2018. Like a vinyl single, it has a Side A and Side B which can be read in any order. It received advanced praise from Don DeLillo, Ben Marcus, Janet Fitch, Dana Spiota, Laura van den Berg, and Dennis Cooper, plus rave reviews in The New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, NPR, and more. It was Largehearted Boy's "Best Novel of 2018."

His first novel "Mira Corpora" was a Finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. It was praised by Dennis Cooper, Eimear McBride, and David Gates. It was selected one of the Best Books of 2013 in Slate, Salon, and The New Statesman. His limited edition novella "Novi Sad" was picked by Vice as one of the best books of 2016.

As a playwright, six of his plays have been produced by the Obie Award-winning Collapsable Giraffe company. "Botanica" was selected by New York Times as "one of the most galvanizing theater experiences of 2012." His adaptation of the Chinese novel "The Dream of the Red Chamber" - a performance for a sleeping audience" debuted in Times Square in 2014. "Vine of the Dead," an art ritual that attempted to contact the spirits of ancestors, premiered in 2016.

He also ran the popular jazz web site Destination: Out (www.destination-out.com).

Reviews

[Jeff Jackson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Right, so I wrote this. But if you're my Goodreads friend, I think there's a solid chance you'll like it, too. A quick rundown: The novel received advanced praise from Don DeLillo, Dennis Cooper, David Gates, Chloe Aridjis, and Justin Taylor. And it's a Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Slate picked it as one of the "Books You Shouldn't Overlook in 2013." Salon chose it for their "Year-End Book Guide." Flavorwire selected it as one of the "10 Best Debut Novels of 2013." It's also gotten positive notices in The Wall Street Journal, Bookforum, and Vice.

It's being described as a coming-of-age story for people who hate coming-of-age stories. A journey across a shifting dreamlike landscape, featuring feral children, teenage oracles, mysterious cassette tapes, abandoned amusement parks, and a reclusive underground rockstar.

It's definitely a dark book, but there's also plenty of beauty and tenderness and even a strange sort of redemption. The novel aims to be adventurous with the prose and structure while still having a propulsive plot that keeps the pages turning.

To see if it's your kind of thing, you can check out excerpts from the book at Guernica and The Collagist.

Finally, here's an interview that just appeared at Tin House.

Tin House called it "a beautiful and intense book, a grimy fever dream in the shape of the fictional autobiography. There is a mesmerizing episode involving a society of runaway children led by a teenage oracle, a cassette tape that might or might not call to mind certain elements of Infinite Jest, and a take-no-prisoners writing style that made me read the entire book in one sitting."

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Our platitudes about carrying on sound listless, like speeches at an infant's wake.

Jeff Jackson hews words and sentences out of the English alphabet that result in the literary equivalent of a swan ice sculpture. The melting, dripping thing is beautiful, but we must never forget that it took a chain saw and a finely-pointed ice pick to create - implements of inherent danger to achieve its end. His craft is evocative, his imagery stuns, his characters shine.

Stray dogs lick discarded alkaline batteries, looking for a leftover charge. The air is perfumed with stale urine and rancid government cheese.

The novel is presented to us in seven chapters connecting a fractured bildungsroman of protagonist Jeff Jackson. The author begins the story with a note that what the reader is about to experience is based upon rediscovered childhood journals. Jackson's writing style combines crisp sentence fragments and long metaphoric musings. The result is finely manicured puzzle pieces - we readers are left to determine if we have all the pieces necessary to interlock the narrative into a recognizable whole.

I don't want to know. There's probably a good reason for not wanting to know, but I don't want to know that either.

This is Jeff Jackson's first novel. May he live to be 100 and publish new works of fiction every year.

[Janie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Memories flutter through a landscape of notebook scribbles that crystallize and then are lost in an alabaster haze. Sharp-edged scenes are dreamily refracted through a cityscape in high-definition colors and iconic songs. Cacodemons stalk the streets for soft prey to dehumanize. A painting stands alone in alluring colors under the moon. It says, breathe.

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

After some linguistic investigation, I found out that Mira Corpora means ‘miraculous bodies’ in Latin. The novel is a gallery of the dreamlike studies painted with the surrealist’s bold brush.

The night is populated with shining green eyes. The pack of stray dogs surrounds me. They sniff the air and growl. Twitching noses, bristling whiskers. I remain perfectly still. When one of them bares its yellow teeth, I start to wail. A wet warmth spreads through my pants. They circle closer. There aren’t so many of them. Their movements are tentative and hobbled. Their thick brown coats are matted with tufts of dried blood. I’m surprised to find their faces are kind. We gaze into each other’s eyes. They begin to lick my face with their rough tongues.

The tale is murky and macabre and a couple of times it turns outright nauseous. It goes like the children’s crusade, the way it would’ve been limned by Max Ernst, probably…

There’s the click of the lock. The squawk of the rusty hinges sounds as startling as a shipyard whistle. Two of the oracles appear in the door frame. Their sinewy faces are almost ectomorphic. Their condor eyes survey the crowd and seem vaguely unsatisfied with the tally. Each holds a glass ashtray filled with damp tea leaves. Everyone around me plays it cool, as if they’re parishioners at some rote worship service. I’m not so suave. My heart starts to sweat.

The part that comprises My Life in the City and My Life in Exile is something between Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany and The Sandman by E.T.A. Hoffmann but on the more nightmarish side.

I thread the rope through the chain that attaches the chandelier to the ceiling. I’m not sure how my fingers know how to braid the contortions of that particular knot. Then I loop the twine into a noose and squeeze it over my head. It feels uncomfortably sturdy. There must be some way to stop this, but then my feet knock over the chair.

We always try to capture someone and at the same time, someone always tries to capture us…

[Forrest · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is what Scott Bradfield tried, and failed to do with his novel A History of Luminous Motion. But, whereas Bradfield's exquisite prose and young narrator were a conflicting mismatch of form and figure, Jackson hits the right tone at the right time for the narrator as he grows from age six to eighteen and beyond.

The book starts with short, terse paragraphs, memories-as-vignettes with the staccato lurching of fragmented memories, in a similar style as Ben Marcus' early works. As the narrator ages, the writings and the situations become more complex (though never too complex) until we reach the drug-addled chapter "My Life in Exile", in which all direction is lost and the narrator's voice becomes as confused as the circumstances being reflected upon, though they are never so blinding that one completely loses the thread. That's not to say that the reader doesn't occasionally "wake up" alongside the narrator in the same state of confusion and blackout-memory-loss about what preceded the present and where exactly one was or is at that moment. At times, the thread is so bare that the narrator and, hence, the reader, questions if he is the same person as the one who related/read the previous chapter. There's no doubt that the narrator has lost his mind, but the question is: "How much was lost"?

The author's caveat at the beginning of the book: "Sometimes it's been difficult to tell my memories from my fantasies" does not help to clarify matters. And, perhaps that's what gives the book some of its power: Though a work of fiction, there is enough verisimilitude to believe that perhaps some of the work is not fiction, but autobiography. Then again, is autobiography ever anything other than fiction, really?

One thing that is clear is Jackson's ability to invoke heartbreak and emotional confusion. Though the book has some surreal situations - a colony of runaways living in the woods, an amusement park inhabited by feral monkeys, an enslavement to drugs and the very real enslavement to another human being - the mental dissonance caused in the mind by these dark, strange scenes never seems to overpower the angst of broken-heartedness that the narrator himself suffers from, but of which he seems nearly unaware. This is a descent into emotional numbness, and it hurts going down. Here, the hero doesn't write the quest, the anti-quest writes the anti-hero.

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

I usually don't review books by GR friends, when such are offered, because I'd probably be overly harsh as some kind of overcompensation for favorable bias. Put differently, friends have to work harder to impress me if I'm approaching their work in any critical manner. Which is why I'm especially happy about how good Jeff Jackson's debut novel is. I don't have any reservations about its excellence.

Mira Corpora presents itself in an explanatory Author's note as an adaptation of Jeff Jackson's own childhood-to-teen journals. The veracity of this statement is immediately called into question by several factors:
-The author (Jeff Jackson) immediately admits difficulty separating dream from reality.
-The narrator ("Jeff Jackson") is never seen writing anything, and for certain periods would seem to be incapable of doing so at all.
-These events could not possibly be true.

Or are they, instead, all too true? Denial doesn't negate them, and there's a raw emotion and urgency underlying the whole that makes it seem impossible that the book isn't real. In some sense.

Of course, it's both. Of course, most books are. Perhaps stories are truer for the insight and elaboration that fiction allows. Perhaps, as Leonora Carrington wrote in The Stone Door, all stories are true.

Regardless, the stories here are in many ways perfect. I say stories, as there's an episodic compartmentalization into ideal units taking place, but this is very much a cohesive novel, one whose sustained effect gradually picks up power from the echo-chamber of its parts, within and without the narrative itself. Each section, spaced at several year intervals, seems condensed from universal experience into a series of casual, terrible epiphanic moments. Casual is a voice thing, the whole unfolds with a casual lyricism that betrays extreme fine-craftsmanship without sounding labored or removed from its inherent rawness and urgency. The result is a near-symbolist refinement of event and image into simple-but-brilliant glyphs and sigils. It is in these that the novel's essential truth is secured. These events have too diamond-sharp and hallucinatory a clarity to be true, they encapsulate too much with too refined a dark elegance not to be.

The spell broke, for me, at only one point. In an interval on the streets of a major city, "Jeff Jackson" is revived by the obsessive mystery of a disappeared musician. The band in question is identifiable, even if it's meant to be entirely fictionalized. I remember when I first heard them, I was also impressed, I still am -- but spotting this band took me out of the experience. Because no real musician, however notable, could bear the weight of Mira Corpora's own myth-making.

This complaint is a kind of fore-handed insult. The one section is weaker because no pinpoint "real" detail can support the novel's otherwise iconic force. This point is at the heart of its complex, delicate mechanics of truth and fiction, distillation and embellishment, distance and emotion.

[David Katzman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mira Corpora is one hell of a bleak book. And it packs quite an emotional wallop. I found very little positivity or hope within the text, but perhaps there was some lurking outside the story. I'll get to that in a bit.

Mira Corpora takes place in essentially six chapters with interludes at the beginning, middle and end. It's quite precisely structured for a book that is about pain, child abuse and the failure of society to care for its children. Each chapter features our main character, named Jeff, at a different age: My Year Zero (6 years old), My Life in Captivity (11 years old), My Life in the Woods (12 years old), My Life in the City (14 years old), My Life in Exile (15 years old), My Zero Year (18 years old). I will block the following as spoilers because it reveals the key plot points. To summarize, for those who don't want to read it...the kid has a really rough time of it and barely survives.

At 6, he seems to be in an orphanage. He participates in a hunt to shoot stray dogs in the woods and two older kids slather him with meat and use him for bait. At 11, he is back with his alcoholic Mom who apparently burned him with an iron, and he runs away from her. At 12, he lives in a runaway campground, a rundown sort of non-hippie commune in the woods. It's a pretty nasty place from a quality-of-life perspective, but the kids aren't so terrible at least. The threat of truckers raping and killing them always hangs over their heads. But compared to what is to come, it is a relatively decent place. At 14, he is homeless in a city. He falls in with a group of teens who obsess over a punk rock singer who seemed to capture the angst and anger of society better than any, but he disappeared. Eventually the kids find him and...let's just say, it's not a joyous reunion. Age 15 is by far the worst. He is at this point like a zombie. Obviously experiencing major food deprivation and possibly other health issues. He stumbles around the city until a man takes him in. To imprison him and drug him and use him as a sex toy for parties. It doesn't get much more disturbing than that. Eventually, he manages to escape, kind of. Or is no longer wanted because he became a little bit too troublesome. One of the most disturbing moments of the book occurs when Jeff realizes his kidnapper has either stolen or purchased a baby and plans to raise it...in captivity...and he does nothing/feels powerless to prevent it. Admittedly, he is about as beaten down as you can get at this point, so he lacked the strength to do anything. It was an image of ultimate impotence. But it was really hard to see him "let this go" and not go the police. I suspect he also needed to avoid the police because they might send him back to his abusive mother. But still, a baby. It was grim. Age 18 finds him learning his mother had finally died, and his decisions around what to do with his inheritance.

The greatest overriding theme here is about the forgotten. The children of our country being abandoned by society. This is true beyond the individual perspective of parents who abuse their kids. It is true from a societal perspective. We live in a cold, cold society. According to a Yale University study published in August in Pediatrics magazine, almost 30% of low-income women with children in diapers can't afford an adequate supply of them. The Department of Agriculture indicates that 17.6 million households in the United States regularly go hungry, up from 12 million ten years ago. But Republicans want to cut the food stamp budget by $40 billion over the next ten years. Of the 23 million households currently in the food stamp program, 3/4 of them include children. Does our society give a shit? Some significant portion doesn't care or is ignorant or intentionally avoids learning about it because they care only about themselves. And the Republicans play to the idea of self-sufficiency even if they really don't support it with their policies. (Not that I'm a fan of the Democrats.) Regardless of whether we blame people for their ignorance or selfishness or we blame the propaganda that misleads them to societal self-abuse in whom they elect (or all of the above), the result is a society that does not give a shit about children. And this book personifies through a narrative that social issue. It's a welcome if painful defamiliarizing scenario

There is some hope that creeps into the novel. Indirectly. It occurs in two ways. The final chapter, when Jeff is 18, begins with him receiving a registered letter. To this point, he had been homeless and unreachable. Although it is not explained where he is living and how he is able to have an address to receive mail (or to be found by someone writing a letter, for that matter), there is hope in the implication that somehow Jeff got his shit together and is living somewhere safe with basic comforts.

The other aspect of hope that comes from this story is from the author's note at the very beginning of the book, and the character's name. The introduction to the story claims that all the scenarios are based on the author's real childhood. That they are adaptations of his own journals. So it states within "a novel." Leaving aside whether we believe this to be true or not (several post-modern authors have inserted themselves as the main character of a book, so it is not an uncommon stylistic choice), this had two effects for me. On one hand, it felt like the author was offering himself up to the abuse undergone by his own character. In other words, he was saying, this is not happening to someone else, this is happening to me. To each of us. When my brother or sister suffers, I suffer. Whether this works in the case of a fictional character, it is a symbolic act of unity. The second meaning of this choice that fell upon me was that of giving us hope (and clearly it is a choice because even if the story is based on Jackson's childhood experiences, he didn't have to indicate that for the reader and he could have named the character differently), when I flipped to the author's bio at the back of the book, it reads:

Jeff Jackson holds an MFA from NYU and is the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Five of his plays have been produced by the Obie Award-winning Collapsable Giraffe company.

Thus, it is implied that despite all the horrors this young "Jeff Jackson" character experienced, he somehow pulled himself together to get not one but two college degrees and become an acclaimed author. The further implication is that society can change.

Although how, that I cannot say.

[Lee Klein · Rating 4 out of 5]

Author's good citizenship on this site compelled this daily goodreads dweller to order his book, thinking maybe it doesn't seem up my alley (Dennis Cooper blurb etc) but what the hell it's Christmastime and I've spent the year reading ancient Austrian/German lit without too many peeks at contemporary Americans published outside the NYC oligarchy. The novel immediately fires you fifty pages in, with brief bits and lots of white space, before it settles down into comparatively traditional yet relentlessly active dramatization and description. First person, present tense, very immediate stuff. Carefully composed prose. Focus on phrases, images, atmospheric effects, and psychic charges more than traditional story, theme, characterization. No history, humor, interiority, explicit articulation of insight. Memorable acts of violence -- a dead chick found in the river lit up like a candle, a nose removed by the narrator's mouth, even loss of virginity leads to gushing blood -- but the most seriously violent bits are revealed as appearing on a painting -- and throughout there's an awareness that all this is vision or dream, not really happening, no more than words on a page. These words appear at the end: "the world around him appears unnaturally shallow, no more than a stretched piece of canvas." And the novel represents that mind state well, bearing down on the prose as though the author doesn't want to let the text let the reader believe in it? A novel about a runaway that runs away from itself? A novel about the psychic trauma of parental abuse? Whatever it is, it's fast and written with care. Honestly probably not very far up my alley (it's sort of the opposite of Knausgaard) but I respect what it's up to and think fans of relentlessly dramatized, psychically skewed, and oft violent stuff would surely be psyched by it. Also, my first Two Dollar Radio publication: a truly perfectly designed paperback with French flaps, high-quality paper, and what seems almost like semi-rubberized covers.

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's a rare day when I read a contemporary novel, and when I do, its fantastic when I read a great one. Jeff Jackson's "Mira Corpora" is an amazing series of short narratives about a youth growing up in a world of pain and misery. The lead character's name is "Jeff Jackson" but I am not sure if its true or not - and to me that's not important. What is important is the visual images I get from his writing - slightly surreal, with a mixture of horror and beauty.

The image that stays with me the most after reading this book is Jackson being tied to a tree in a dark (as it should be) forest with honey gook over his body, just waiting for the wild dogs to come by. But saying that the narrative in this book is a real page-turner. The pace moves in a nice pattern and the beauty of the writing is crystal clear. I find a lot of heart in "Mira Corpora" but its never sweetness, but more of a bitter-sweet trip to the youth's underworld. I love how the book goes from forest to urban city. The location, although never stated, is important to the book. It can be just a figment of the author's imagination, but it becomes real, in a dreamy way, through out the novel.

I picked this book up at Skylight Books, because I needed to read something while waiting for someone - and at the time I was reading the new Pynchon novel. "Mira Corpora" became a more important book for me to read and finish than Pynchon. Which says a lot to the talent and vision of Jackson. Also want to note that the book is beautifully designed. A classic act!

[Proustitute (on hiatus) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I record the events of my life, filling up one notebook after another. Maybe I’m not getting the details exactly right, but it doesn’t matter. The strict facts hold no currency here. What counts is the saliva I just spat on this very sheet of paper.

Jeff Jackson’s first book considers the formative years, those crucial years that see us coming into our own individuality and subjectivity while faced with traumas, trials, and, in this case, ever so many dogs who seem to be hungry for their pound of flesh. Like many childhood coming-of-age stories, Jackson’s inverts reality: like Alice’s world in the looking-glass, like Pip literally turned upside-down in the opening pages of Great Expectations, and like Lacan’s subjectival model of the inverted bouquet in the mirror stage, Jackson insists that in order to fathom the depths of childhood, one must approach it back to front.



Here, our narrator, also named “Jeff Jackson,” reveals his childhood in sketches or fragments, but whether these are “real”—the prologue mentions how the author chanced upon old notebooks that eventually became the finished product Mira Corpora—or “imagined” scenes of childhood needn’t matter at all. Isn’t one’s childhood filled with as many unreal or exaggerated scenes as it is populated by intense realities and crushing blows?

Jackson’s narrator meanders through fantasized realities, through waking nightmares. There are intense yearnings for intimacy—an alcoholic mother, a glimpse across the street to catch the eye of a young girl who is similarly (albeit differently) captured—as well as battles for self-discovery at the hands of exploitative authoritative figures who capitalize on childhood, “innocence,” and the social and cultural fantasies and anxieties about any transient state. How can the individual triumph when the oracle—a teenaged girl, doped up on some yellow pill—delivers the prophecy on a blank sheet of paper? How can the many figurative and literal bodies—dead or all-but-dead—be laid to rest: by funeral pyre or through some means of automation, consisting of dehumanization and brainwashing?

The scope in Mira Corpora is wide indeed, and one can only be vague in discussing a book like this whose beauty lies in the rhythm and the power to disturb and disorient. Jackson has immense skill in his reinvention of cultural myths and in moving almost seamlessly between ancient lore to an almost Dennis Cooper-influenced world of sex, drugs, and longing; from a David Lynch inspired cinematic world of interlopers, outsiders, and doppelgangers to an almost Carnivale-esque examination of reality and its discontents. With declarative prose that mimics the poise of the narrator as he navigates between dreaming and intense self-revelation, this is a book that can invoke the smell of burning flesh just as succinctly as it can make the reader feel the tongues of wild dogs licking skin, the pang of nearly getting away, and the sad drone of a singer’s voice who might have lost everything yet still possesses the most important thing of all: the power to affect, to entrance, to heal.

[Ben Winch · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s funny how people get hung up on the landscape of a book – on its surface. Mira Corpora a “punk rock” novel? On the basis of what, its subject matter? Yeah, it tells a wild story, but the telling of it is anything but wild. Slick, professional, meticulously edited, this is a careful emergence into the limelight.

Me, I find meaningful similarities with mild-mannered sometimes-children’s author Russell Hoban, whose characters seem powered by algorithms. Like robots they cross and re-cross the same parched rectangle; you get the feeling they could go on forever. And I suspect, like Hoban, Jeff Jackson could transplant his formula into any setting. He’s a punk like Hoban’s a post-nuclear tribesperson, in other words. It’s scenery.

None of which is a problem, if you don’t take the marketing to heart. And funnily enough, the marketing is its own negation. Because what could be less punk than lavish, unchallenging book design and a blurb that makes all the usual concessions to mainstream niceties? (“Jeff Jackson holds an MFA from NYU...” etc. And: “an electrifying story of mad hope and redemption in the face of nightmarish odds”.)

But here’s the real rub: it’s affectless. Its characters barely exist beyond names, gestures and identifying traits. They flit on, they flit off; there’s damn near no interaction. It makes Jackson’s fabled Author’s Note (“based on journals I kept growing up”) extra puzzling. Why insist on what is, after all, an old sleight of hand? I’m guessing the truth is less dramatic. Could this be a younger man’s novel, edited to its current state with mature hindsight? If so, it’s impressive. But just to clarify: Riddley Walker it ain’t.

[Mariel · Rating 4 out of 5]

In my dream, I'm convinced these stories contain the secret of my own destiny. As he unfurls his saga, the creature observes me with its kind golden eyes.

Windows not a part of them. Doors shut in walk through walls ghost faces. All of their haunted eyes living next year going on yesterday. Maybe lights will turn inside them.

But until then they'll make prophecies of truck driver's brutal orgies, savage in oracular smugness. Run away where there are no pasts the freedom to accept unspoken bonds. It squirms my brain into a ramen cup of soup to think of the obligatory sexual relations between the very young girls and boys. I'm reminded of the snarling one eye on the coppers and the other shut to friends and family pushing their kind into a short future. I don't belong with them so maybe that's why I can't get how one becomes the evil that's yours and the other the one thing you'll admit is so fucked up about the whole thing. They don't feel safe with each other, to me. There's no of a kind unless everyone is alone. The edges wash up corpses of the suicides who must not have reconciled it. If they could think of some way to put it that makes everyone not alone they'd still be alone since it doesn't work that way always, even when you can do it. Come up with some way it's not the wrong dark. Jeff looks at the faces where the wild is murdered in acceptance. The kind of National Geographic show where you root for the rabbit but can feel the hunger of the hyena. He learns your name as you run away. Hyaenas can do that. Sniff around where you live and study your habits and shit. This is going to be a habit of running away when the we're all getting something out of life turns into what you lose when one of you dies. They know Jeff by name on the streets. They know he's still doing that voice in your head. His head, I mean. The when it is possible to ward off the worst that could ever happen. You're alone with a nothing. Me too. I remember thinking a lot about Richey Edwards. Listening to Manic Street Preachers and too bad we had no snow here 'cause I could track where he had no footprints. Jeff and his- Wait, so the three teenagers who give him the Kin Mersey tape because he must be closer to the ear living on the grindstone. So I felt a pang I wish I hadn't ever had about these kids. It would have been something- I don't know what. It belonged to much to another side I didn't get to. They didn't have anything that great, except each other (while it lasts). But still. I would have gone with them too, and I would have wanted to leave when they witness Kin Mersey's hungry red tips reaching for a beyond outside of his own terms. But I also couldn't stop thinking how a later Jeff would have looked to this Jeff when he is as helpless to make the world better than it is for long enough to endure having to live in it. When his body prematurely births itself from the womb of the swirly eyed snake captor full on Jungle Book style, well, I guess his mind is late. Maybe it'll be a fat baby after all that death mama's milk. Didn't Jeff think hey, preggers Ruth wouldn't have entered Gert-Jan's orbit if Jeff hadn't moved in with her? I must have lived there too long because I already accepted the German's strange powers, not to mention the eat or be eaten of the streets. Rather, get out of the way of the king of the forest. These streets are so oppressive because you can't forget there's a food chain. But what if you were looking into his face when he keeps the baby and Lady's tramp dog is all forgotten? Nothing but the twinges of the Stockholm's tentacles? Did he want anything after the prayers? Something to run with. Where's the baby in the window, like the girl of the orange tree and the one behind the telescope from gave up.

I was thinking about the fat kid eating his mind out in the dumpster. Kin Mersey and what happened just before he couldn't want anymore. I have always done this thing of thinking about stuff and forgetting where I'm present. That others can see. I got into trouble at work again for having a bad attitude, for not being happy. I was just thinking about that fat kid eating that cassette tape. What it must have looked like. I don't know what to say about what he chooses to do with it and how to express the loss other than making faces that'll make daily life another so tired. That's what I liked best about this book. The helpless moving inside you can't do anything with.

Does anyone else get afraid of leaning on some music to get through something you don't want to think about again (in case it comes back)? I had that feeling again of "Damn, I still do that shit" when Jeff goes back to the tape that was the life instead of life. It is another look if your guts had a face. It'd say something like, oh, damn you can't avoid it.

I don't know what to say about when he turns his back on his mother's last wishes. I feel like it is too late for truths when that was your mother. So she could have loved him, once. So she could want to do something, in an after. But yeah, too late. That's when the fragments show up in everything else when you don't want them to. That's when you make them come back when you could be happy. I already forgot where the quote about the kinds of truths in fiction came from. But I remember something Virginia Woolf said that was soul mate. She said something like how it didn't have to have happened to be true. I feel like there's some trick in that when it comes to reading the constellations in all of those windows too. Some kind of something. Doesn't have to be anything other than some speechless insides like wanting that kid to have that tape and then you don't know what to do.

[ipsit · Rating 4 out of 5]

Before Jeff Jackson’s debut novel, Mira Corpora, even begins it defines itself in contradiction. There is the typical disclaimer for works of fiction: “All names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s lively imagination,” but on the next page a note reads: “This novel is based on the journals I kept while growing up… Sometimes it’s been difficult to tell my memories from my fantasies, but that was true even then.” Such is the first of several enveloping mechanisms at work in the novel, the main body of which consists of seven parts, each following the life of a narrator who shares the author’s name.

The narrator’s life seems both wholly real and wholly unreal. As we follow him from location to location, set at ages six to 18, we find him pushed as if from one owner to another—a child among packs of dogs in a dark forest; in a house with an abusive, knife-wielding mother; in a village of occult squatters where death seems lurking; through teenage obsession with cryptic music and forced experience as a sex dummy. Throughout it all the narrator searches for something that is his, but finds only more connections to further worlds with nothing of him in them.

There are few coming-of-age-esque novels that don’t make me feel like I’m being lied to, manipulated into caring to the point where I can’t care at all. Mira Corpora is one of those few. It subverts itself and what it came from so many times that by the end you feel like it could have existed no other way.

[Dottie B · Rating 2 out of 5]

DO NOT be fooled by the pretty pink cover or title! I kept on waiting for Mira to show up and save the day but she never did. What's up with that? I would have given the book one star but I like the name Mira so I tacked one on for good measure. I know this publisher is a local operation. The pretty young girl at the bookshop told me so. She claimed this was a family run operation. Curious what kind of family would put this out? Maybe the Adams Family LOL. Seriously. I felt very bad for the little boy who is in this book and I wanted to give him a hug but alas it was a book and I could not! Feel like all he needed was some good love. Hugs are good. The world is such a sad place sometimes. I would have preferred if a big-hearted mother named Mira had swung on by to save the day, but you can't have it all. I think I like the name Mira because it means "Look" in Spanish. I got A's in Spanish. My teacher in high school was... MUY CALIENTE. He was like a mix between Denzel and the guy from Law and Order. Oh my. Getting flushed just thinking about him. Good thing I am going to bed soon. Next up! The Crystal Eaters. Hopefully the bookstore lady didn't steer me wrong this time. Go Buckeyes!

[Richard Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mira Corpora is a lush and unsettling read, one that hypnotizes as it cause you to unhinge, your emotions unfurling, coming undone, from the inside out. A powerful book. Poetic and lyrical in its darkness.

[Bud Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is in my top ten books. It knocked Huckleberry Finn off the list and then it went down into the scummy ditch where Huckleberry Finn was and it slit Huckleberry Finn's throat. So yeah, love this book. Five stars.

[Brooks Sterritt · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The slow-motion ballet of soundless steps."

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

I hate coming-of-age stories.

Inevitably, they seem to rely on a combination of emotional manipulation, cheap epiphanies and boring nostalgia in order to really 'work.'

That's what makes Jeff Jackson's Mira Corpora such a refreshing, strange and often alarming read. Its powered by an almost trancelike style that never attempts to pull for your typical emotional effect. Instead we follow along as Jackson, apparently pulling from his own traumatic childhood and adolescence, weaves a precise set of episodes that he observes with an almost hypnotic detachment.

Writing prose like this, especially about one's own life, takes enormous focus and discipline and Jackson pulls it off admirably. He captures the sheer strangeness of ones own past, of odd rituals and confused mindsets that can never be truly contextualized, but which inevitably form the basis of what we are.

[A · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5. With the artfagsploitation cover art (complete with soft touch matte finish on the cover stock) and a big blurb from Big Daddy Dennis himself, I was expecting something Cooperesque -- cruel, senseless, and unrelenting in its violence and anger. Nothing wrong with that, but I feel like that whole "rent boi in extremis" thing has been done so often by so many now that it's become almost a default, cliche voice for young, queerish first time novelists.

Well shame on me. While yes, Jackson's vision can be brutal, the book was actually quite poised and even gentle at times, with several arrestingly beautiful moments and tableaux. Jackson has a wonderful imagination, and the dream logic and swirl of symbols that floated through the book worked quite well. One half-star off the 4 because although everything is quite accomplished, it didn't linger on long for me -- a fleeting beauty just like the title character.

[Adam Floridia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dark. Edgy. Surreal. Unsettling. My vocabulary is failing me right now, but other words along those lines.

The writing was solid; I just never felt like I got a firm foothold in the book. There was definitely a chronology, a loose plot, but I had trouble discerning the big picture. Unlike a random character at the end, I wasn't "Picking up pieces on the fly, amazed at how easily seemingly random events slot into their proper places, suggesting a previously unknown pattern he simply has to follow to its logical conclusion" (185). Maybe that's in part because of the dark/edgy/surreal/unsettling nature of each of the scenes, scenes that are ostensibly a mixture of "memories and fantasies." The title, the author's note, the first chapter and numerous other scenes make me wonder if the whole work is, sort of, an allegory for a hellishly intense introspective nightmare.

I definitely can see someone else really enjoying this book; it just isn't for my particular tastes.

[Michael Seidlinger · Rating 5 out of 5]

We all have rituals to live by, certain routines that would turn our lives upside down if omitted. It feels a whole lot like knowing that you’re forgetting to do something but no matter what you do to try to recover the thread it is too late. You’ll remember later, when it’s no longer relevant. We abide by certain actions, repetitions of blinking or breathing, certain poems and prayers that outline our days. It isn’t special what we do; rather, why we develop those rituals and routines, well that’s something else entirely. In Mira Corpora, Jeff Jackson’s remarkable nightmarish fugue of a novel, the novel itself becomes the exemplification of the writer’s routine.

[Review forthcoming]

[Leslie]

One of those books about youth that would never get shelved as YA but it ought to be. This book is like Lord of the Flies set to a Babes in Toyland song (with oracles!). I'm zero percent surprised that the author said in an interview that his dream director for a film adaptation would be Harmony Korine.

[Jim Taone · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very inventive coming-of-age tale. Subversive where others may be sentimental. Quick pace makes it a very quick and energetic read. I look forward to seeing how Jackson's voice emerges in his future works.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have had a tremendous problem since the J.T. Leroy, James Frey and other 'controversies' regarding authorial truth and accuracy with any work by a white, male (as defined by themselves), American author claiming to have written a memoir about being abused, homeless, on the streets, etc. (my caution has nothing to do with authors such as, for example, Rigoberto Gonzalez or Jaime Cortez) particularly those who, like Jeff Jackson in 'Mira Corpra', proclaim at the beginning:

"This novel is based on the journals I kept growing up. When I rediscovered these documents, they helped me confront the fragments of my childhood and understand the gaps are part of the whole. Sometimes it has been difficult to tell my memories from my fantasies, but that was true even then. Throughout I've tried to honor (sic) the source material and early attempts to wrest those experiences into language."

Is this the language of an author using long established literary tropes and conventions of presenting 'found' documents containing accounts of fantastic experiences such as Michael Moorcock? or is it a formulaic preventative justification like Frey's post the revelation of his 'memoirs' falsity to use his 'suffering' to justify his lies? A cursory reading of reviews on GR suggests that many readers believe that the novel is a portrait of authorial experiences. I don't and here are some egregious falsehoods and improbabilities:

1. If you slather a six year old in meat waste and dog food and tie him to a tree and leave him for a pack of feral dogs to find the result will be that the dogs eat the child, not lick him clean.
2. If your mother burns your 12 year old back with an iron and you then run away from home and live in the forest with other young children, your wounds untended and unwashed, eating food from tins and living in wet, dirty clothes you don't have marvellous adventures you develop peritonitis and die.
3. If you are a 14 year old living in a cardboard box and find a 'cassette' left outside your box as a 'present' your first reaction is unlikely to go off on a quest to find a Walkman but to curse whoever left it for not leaving a walkman and also any money or food.
4. If there is a 14 year old living on the streets in a novel published in 2014 who receives a cassette and recognises it and knows what a Walkman is I want to know what year the novel is set in. Is this a 'historical novel?
5. If there was a 14 year old living in a cardboard box for any length of time he would be a feral child as dangerous as the dogs he supposedly met at 6 years.

I could go on - I made note of at least twice as many idiocies before ceasing to write them down and I was only half way through this short novel - but I won't because what I have said establishes everything wrong with this novel. It is one of the most revolting of current literary conceits - poverty porn - written by and for white, middle class suburbanites for white middle class suburbanites. This literature by and for all those too young to have been David Wojnarowicz (though I have grave doubts that many of Jackson's readers would have heard of let alone read Wojnarowicz).

The almost complete absence (the qualifier is really not needed) of minorities is notable and it is unsurprising to discover, when the 14 year old meets up, at a cafe, with those who left him the cassette (and remain unconcerned with his well being by not buying him a drink let alone a meal), that they are living in an apartment inherited by one of them and have access to such items as a vehicular transport. These arevwannabes street kids whose laundry is still done by mummy or maids.

Where is this novel set? There is no indication - just general run-down city-scapes which may be designed to be 'timeless' but comes over as 'generic' like those films set in 'gritty' American cities but clearly filmed in Canada. This novel is like those films, based on a cliched USA that barely rises above the level of Disneyland in terms of reality. The author, like so many, is way too young (please see my footnote *1 regarding the author's age) to have experienced the lower East Side or any other part of New York, including Brooklyn, was a place of young exciting talent. In fact it is more than likely that by the time Mr. Jackson thought of running away to some vibrant, exciting inner city slum to become a new Rimbaud there was nowhere to run too, not in the USA, not in Europe. The age of the flaneur was long dead.

Looking into the past for a golden age is not unusual, though not traditional to American authors, who normally saw the golden age as just around the corner. What is unusual and, for me, reprehensible, is the manufacturing of pain and suffering and attempting to pass it off as your own. A white middle class suburban boy (and they almost always are - once again the qualifiers is really not needed) may no longer be able to go off and live in a crumbling, verminous, cold water slum in central city locations adjacent to the haunts of the rich and mighty but that does not mean there are not verminous slums, children on the street or desperate, lonely, powerless and abused people out there. They just aren't like them, but then they never were. I am pretty sure that if Jackson, or any of the other numerous wannabees, had actually drifted into the milieu of 'The Waterfront Journals' they would have run screaming back to the safety of the suburbs.

I was going to give this work two stars because it is well written but then knocked it back to one star. For me there is no greater offence in literature than falsity. This is a dishonest novel and is an insult both to those authors who have genuinely known or explored America's dark depths but the denizens of those depths whose reality has been stolen and worn by others.

*1 I have tried, but failed, to ascertain Jeff Jackson's date of birth but based on when he commenced his career as a writer suggests a DOB of 1990 at the earliest.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having read only a handful of books published by Two Dollar Radio, about half of which were by Rudy Wurlitzer, I note similarities between Jeff Jackson’s MIRA CORPORA and another book they put out, Grace Krilanovich’s ORANGE EATS CREEPS, both something like baroque gothic fantasias featuring runaway youth and ample misadventure of a colourfully sordid nature. My contention would be that ORANGE EATS CREEPS is by some measure the superior book, though there can be no denying that Jeff Jackson’s investment in a kind of arch-sinister self-mythologization is at the very least curious. It is also calibrated for fiendish readability. At the beginning of the book Jackson tells us that what follows is extrapolated from journals he kept whilst growing up, only recently stumbled upon: “When I rediscovered these documents, they helped me confront the fragments of my childhood and understand that the gaps are also part of the whole.” If Jackson is not sure quite what constitutes reality and what constitutes fantasy, he would have us believe, that was just as much the case at the time the specified events were occurring. How seriously should we take these claims? It is almost beside the point. It is simply a fact that if everything in the novel were actually true almost nobody would be inclined to believe that was the case, and obviously Jeff Jackson knows this, is playing with it. MIRA CORPORA is very much a novel, though one that wants us to expend some energy considering veracity at least at the level of the abstract. Things are (perhaps somewhat charmingly) problematized by an epigraph at the start of the novel’s final section. Robert Frank is quoted as follows: “Passing off what might be true as fiction seems a better vocation to me than passing off what is quite possibly fiction as truth.” Readers will note that Frank, by way of this statement, would seem to undermine precisely what Jackson stated he was striving to do with MIRA CORPORA at the outset, and that in incorporating this bit of Robert Frank pedagogy, Jackson is perhaps taking the piss, introducing an all-too-necessary schism of ironic mischief. All well and good, I suppose, but perhaps too little too late. Robert Frank, known to most for his photography and his films, a cantankerous genius I have long revered, does not stand alone. MIRA CORPORA is in fact peppered with epigraphs, one from the great Paul Éluard kicking off the novel proper and seven more emblazoning the opening page of each of its principal sections, quotations from The Mekons, Eudora Welty, Robert Musil, Antonin Atraud, Maurice Blanchot, Franz Kafka, and finally, of course, Mr. Frank. The preceding list is notably comprised of major heavy hitters to whom I am positively in thrall. This is a fact that would seem to portend something like fealty to a tradition with which I am already very much on board. Look, I can see how Blanchot and Kafka might have influenced MIRA CORPORA to a certain extent, perhaps Artaud, certainly the Mekons. Fine. But all this business with epigraphs very much risks giving you the wrong idea. Jackson’s debut novel is far more popular culture with underground affectations than it is high literature. If it is “provocative” it is “provocative” very much in scare quotes. It has become something of a custom for the jaded to mock writers and other emissaries of the culture for their fatuous outrageousness, and we can thank this tendency for the derisive term “edgelord,” a disparagement it is not in the least difficult to imagine being applied to Jackson. His half-jokey malevolence, perhaps something like Boutique Transgression, can come off as artless in the way that much does in the novel. I find the prose generally somewhat artless, though it is certainly in possession of a certain glide, having been engineered very much for this purpose. The novel is written in the present tense. It is punchy, sometimes practically staccato. There would seem to be some debt to hard-boiled pulp. I am generally not a big fan of fiction written in the present tense. The approach suggests a concession to the television-viewer and movie-goer’s thirst(s) for ersatz immediacy. William H. Gass has written extremely elegantly against the present tense in prose. I’m more or less with Bill on this one. There are always going to be exceptions. See my review of Walker Percy’s THE MOVIEGOER, where I more or less accept the author’s use of the method on his terms. But if I find the present tense in the novel somewhat tacky, I find unrelentingly tacky the present tense in memoirs and books that presume to excavate the past or memory. I am not certain, by way of example, that there is anywhere out there in the known world a book more tacky than James Frey’s A MILLION LITTLE PIECES. It hurts me to say that Jackson’s approach betrays notable similarities to Frey’s. There is also a mystical tendency in Jackson, often manifested in a sense of the magick inherent to the page itself, as at the beginning of the book when the author writes of himself drawing an opening onto the page, entering the opening, descending some stairs, and engaging in some dungeon sadomasochism with the prone body of a boy. This is already conceptually dubious and the execution glaringly fails to sell it. The page will reappear in its capacity as metaphysical container or provisional limit. It does so in the final section. The final section strikes me as by some measure the most dire: it’s all concept, absence of brick and mortar, perhaps explicable but probably not defensible. Okay, okay. So far I have been pretty harsh. I sound like I hate MIRA CORPORA, and “hate” just isn’t the right word at all. It would be like hating the precocious kid whose story it tells, which would probably make you a jerk. Surely we need our ardent punk mythologies, no? Of course. Of course we do. I have a certain admiration for the novel’s schematics (provided we just completely ignore the final section). I like how we begin attenuated, the form utilized to encapsulate the arrival of a child’s consciousness at a specific strata of realization, all in the context of a hunting party. It makes sense that we next find the child in troubling bondage, living in “captivity” with abusive alcoholic mother, the girl across the street peering through the curtains, herself perhaps in an even more monstrous captivity. While eleven-year-old Jeff’s flight does indeed have something of the artless to it, well, maybe that just makes it all the more sweet and true, as though maybe this is indeed close to how the boy would have recorded it himself. What do I think of twelve-year-old Jeff and Liberia, Empire of children, situated deep in the woods? The “My Life in the Woods” chapter is that in which the silly and the transcendent exist most harmoniously. Liberia. Nearby is an abandoned wild kingdom theme part. Kids fuck in the cages. “There’s a rumor the place is haunted. Not by ghosts, but gibbons.” There may be escaped monkeys in the woods. There are whisperings concerning escaped monkeys despoiling nearby and perhaps-not-so-nearby communities. Marauding truckers arrive and lay waste to the camp, committing unspeakable acts of violence, violence so outrageously depicted as to be nakedly idiotic. “It’s a backwater holocaust. A bucolic apocalypse. A total extinction.” Or is this merely a painting? THE BALLAD OF LIBERIA. “The thing is so over the top that everyone can’t help but love it.” Cute, Jackson, cute. All the kids love the "over the top" painting. An orgiastic paint battle follows, the kids all a delighted multicoloured mess. There is Monrovia, “the row of condemned houses on the edge of the woods,” where Jeff (again, twelve years of age) loses his virginity to a girl named Lydia in a dubiously erotica-lite passage. The kids discover the dead body of a teenage girl at the bottom of the river, a probable suicide. The French girl, Nycette, stoned on cannabis and versed in the “rites and rituals of the Incans,” suggests they burn the body. They do just that. Then there is the “dead village” and the oracles who there abide. The oracle Sara provides Jeff with a very bad omen, a blank sheet of paper (reverberating as that does in this particular novel), evidently equivalent to “the tarot card of the skeleton astride his emaciated steed.” There is some ecstatic communal music. The oracle Sarah banishes Jeff but gives him a pill, some kind of prophecy agent. It has a happy face on it. Of fucking course it does. Jeff takes the pill, slowly begins to trip. He sees blankness. That’s the end of “My Life in the Woods.” Whether you find this all ridiculous or delightful or both will give you some idea of whether the book is generally going to be for you. You may be inclined to trail after young Jeff Jackson. Off to the city with its “usual shuffling armada of runaways with stolen skateboards, homeless with borrowed shopping carts, police practicing blindness behind their shades.” Ah, yes, good ol’ Jeff in the good ol’ city: “Stray dogs lick discarded alkaline batteries, looking for a leftover charge. The air is perfumed with stale urine and rancid government cheese.” The grimy, grimy city, where Jeff receives a mysterious cassette tape and joins two other youngsters in their obsessive quest after the disappeared musician Kin Mersey, heard braying on the cassette in question. At a certain point Jeff bites off the nose of a Latino tough. Pretty silly, maybe kinda great. Later he and his friends sloppily rob a group of hard rock jagoffs of their gear. Pretty silly, definitely kinda great. Subsequently fifteen-year-old Jeff will be dead but also not dead, and dead but not dead will attempt to hang himself, unsuccessfully, again in captivity to another adult, an especially predatory man named Gert-Jan. Jeff will escape Gert-Jan and be pursued by him through slumland. Jeff will be protected for a time by the pregnant Ruth. “A black bandana highlights her tufts of tangled blond curls. The flowing gypsy dress accentuates her stomach and the tattoo of an insecticide can on her shoulder.” Tattoo of an insecticide can. It doesn’t get much more Jeff Jackson than that. At eighteen, Jeff will meet with “The Estate Disbursement Attorney” and be given an opportunity to pay salubrious postmortem disrespect to his mother, in so doing proving himself an ace badass, because he fucks himself out of an inheritance (itself a kind of prison) in the process. Yes. That’s how mythology works. Sometimes Oedipus has to kill his mom.

[Lee Foust · Rating 3 out of 5]

In an effort to renew the grand old tradition of literary realism, the Modernists added the first person narrator to the great American novel--it lent an air of authenticity to those old, disembodied omniscient narrators of the 1800s, it made a narrative more plausible, it allowed for the subjective nature of so-called reality, and was easier to stomach. After the Second World War the Post-Modern novel began a process of destabilizing the first person narrator, of questioning the voice that tells the story further by admitting to that voice's odd resemblance to, and yet conflict with, the convention of literary authorship. I, myself, in my own first novel, could not resist playing this game: I learned it from Philippe Sollers, Maurice Blanchot, Kathy Acker, et al. In Mira Corpora Jeff Jackson follows suit, telling us in a prefatory "Author's note" that the novel is based upon notebooks that he kept growing up--but that for him, fantasy and reality have always been somewhat blurred.

At first this greatly intrigued me and appeared a terrifically interesting experiment.

However, now at novel's end, I feel compelled to ask if the "Author's Note" is within the fiction or a legitimate extra-fictional statement. I must say it reminds me of Morrissey's strategy of wearing a false hearing aid in photo shoots during the early days of the Smiths to garner pity from a pitiless British music press. I mean, am I supposed to cut the author slack due to mental instability? Or because the novel was mined from the notebooks of a minor? Since realistic literary fiction is, by its very nature, a mix of imagination and experience, perhaps we're all mad--or is sanity merely a function of knowing when you are fictionalizing and knowing when you are remembering correctly? (If so, both Brian Williams and Bill O'Reilly are publicly mad.) Still, I felt quite cheated when the rest of the novel proceeded in a very controlled and almost always realistic manner. I kept waiting for something impossible, something unmistakeably fantastically imaginative to happen, but it was all more-or-less reasonable, plausible--if often grotty, certainly not run-of-the-mill human experience--events, realistically described--so the expectation of a blending of the real and imaginary paid off in no spectacular way beyond the regular boundaries of what we have come to expect from any novel. I guess I'm a little disappointed at that, especially given the lovely and kind of dream-like opening section.

The novel begins with a bang, in its best section, when young Jeff is used as bait by other children to catch wild dogs on a wild dog hunt--certainly the most original (single paragraphs centered on otherwise white pages--just lovely) and imaginative section of the story. It sets the self-named protagonist as a passive victim who is surprised--or, at least I was, as a reader--when his victimization turns out to be pleasurable: the wild dogs arrive and lick the food he has been smeared with off of him instead of tearing him to pieces to get it.

The other stages of the novel pretty much repeat this same story with notable variations: alcoholic mother who nurtures and tortures J.J. and from whom he flees, loss of virginity and other experiences in a runaway's woodland commune of sorts, living on the mean streets of some city and searching for a similarly victimized, mentally unstable, drug-addicted musician, and finally as the sex slave of a shady European. While there is some pretty good writing, aesthetically (I was engrossed from start to finish), I grew more and more impatient with the narrative as it went on. Sadly, it was so controlled, so careful not to reveal a specific place or the actual horrors of most of the situations--all alluded to cryptically but never shown--that I felt unduly manipulated by the author, who seemed no closer to the character Jeff Jackson than any other narrator, if fact considerably more distanced than some--since it's a novel about victimization mostly, that's ironic. At its worst the novel reminded me of the execrable Steps by Jerzy Kosinski, how that novel seemed to make events like rape and murder cool through its slick, vague allusions to horrors from its dis-attached narrative voice. In the end Mira Corpora made me yearn for the brutal honesty of Hemingway, Hubert Selby Jr., Flannery O'Connor, Steinbeck, Vonnegut even, writers who, by not turning away from or deflecting the horror, by showing humanity with all of its disgusting warts, make narratives both awkward and raw.

[Xian Xian · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book received a lot of well-deserved hype in the small press world. Sadly, I will probably not see this in Barnes N' Nobles or Book Outlet. I also won't write a good enough review for it either. No sympathy tears, I just finished this awhile ago, and when that happens it's hard to get words for it. You can also blame summer laziness in my tardiness of getting stuff down. But I don't think I will be forgetting this book anytime soon. I guess like I did with MW, I will be doing a listicle review. I will admit that it took me awhile to get into the first part of the book, but as soon the narrator escapes into a reality, I was absorbed into it.

1. It starts off like a journal where he opens up this new world in which he apparently never leaves until he "grows up."

2. This is the dysfunctional YA I've been waiting for. Yes, that sounds a little sick, but let me explain. This book took place for most of the main character's young life and ends at an age that is towards the end of the young adult phase of life. It's rough, but not sugar coated, it's bleak, and it never stops to coddle the reader. It's quite brutal and deviant much like the punk rock movie poster cover. It's terrifying.

3. What makes it more harrowing is that this book is so unforgiving and yet it's so magical. I've never read Chronicles of Narnia because I am a peasant, but the prose in this book totally clashes with the horrific stuff the narrator goes through. It has a dreamy, innocent quality, you can't really tell what's real or not since for most the book, the narrator was a child for most of the novel. And yes, 20 years old is, according to older people, a kid still.

4. The book's cinematic prose reminds me of how the author is a playwright and you can definitely tell that that carries on as an influence in his writing. In it's exact but not so heavy use of imagery that seems to flow right with the story, no info dumps of description, and the characters feel real, the narrator is whispering in your head, as he faces nightmares of temporarily leave an unaccepting civilization, only to come back, and die a little inside.

5. As expected, there's no happy ending, but instead a closure to what is supposed to be left behind, not finished, but wanting to be over with it.

Rating: 5/5

Originally posted here: http://wordsnotesandfiction.blogspot....

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

After seeing this book on several Top 10 Lists, I decided to bite the bullet and read Mira Corpora. Although I was expecting a good read, I was not prepared for how completely engrossing and accessible it is. Despite being touted as “experimental” and “cutting edge,” Jeff Jackson’s story of feral teenagers is deeply moving without being maudlin or sentimental.

Its pacing is like a runaway train…reading this book reminded me of seeing North by Northwest for the first time…you’re not sure where the story is going, but are determined to hang on tight to see where it ends. Be warned: The phone’s gonna ring, your dog needs to be fed and you’ll feel the burning urge to pee, but those things won’t matter while you’re reading this book.

People seeking a story that grabs them by the brain and won’t let them go should give Mira Corpora a whirl. Jackson’s superb writing technique is a bit like a David Blaine conjuring feat. After witnessing it, you’re immediately compelled to go back to the beginning to figure out how it’s done. With each successive read, you become increasingly impressed and confounded. Ultimately, you throw up your hands and surrender to its terrible beauty and power.

[Robert Vaughan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not sure if it's because I read this entire book while flying home from Mexico. Or because I'd just finished Haints Stay, another fantastic Two Dollar Radio book. Or because as a kid, I also kept journals, wrote down my dreams, and have not visited them, as Jackson claims he has. There could be about a thousand other reasons why this book has stayed inside me. It's visceral, and dream-like. Ghostly. Scary. Dark. Hallucinogenic. And also Jackson's own background as a playwright does seem apparent in the cinematic manner this book wanders forth. I loved the different "chapters," how seemingly unconnected, to the point in which you wondered who the protagonist is. (Do we ever really know?) And the emotional depth in certain parts felt like shards of ice digging into my insides. I felt honored to know this author from our few social interactions, and again, to see where he's headed with a career most certainly carving out for him. I waited two years to read this because when it came along, it seemed like all of my indie friends read it instantly. But that's not really it- I was afraid I would never want it to end. And I was right.

[Kelby Losack · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jeff Jackson's MIRA CORPORA is a collection of lucid journal entries. The prose is lean while still frequently focusing in on finding the fantastic within the mundane, as if written by a curious, stoic child. It keeps the stories in a state between consciousness and dreaming, where both worlds are full of wonder and terror. This is less like a reading experience, more like a drug trip.