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NICETIES: Aural Ardor, Pardon Me
Fiction. Poetry. NICETIES is a subversive text of lingual dissonance in which vocality precedes sense-making operations. Its phonics disrupt narrative through syntactical atonalities."If you're weary of mild, obedient prose, try plunging into the pages of Elizabeth Mikesch's exuberant debut. This book is witchcraft: stories refreshingly loosely translated from the real by a mind that moves on its own."--Noy Holland"It will hardly do the trick to say that NICETIES is a breath of fresh air. In Elizabeth Mikesch's compressedly melodious prose, a reader inhales purifying drafts of something entirely unexpected in these literary dog days--not some novelty intoxicant concocted as a careerist stunt but some rarer ether releasing itself at long last into the world to dazzle, yes, but also to clarify so much of what we had never dreamed clarifiable about the ecstasy of our human mess."--Gary Lutz
88 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 2014
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June 9, 2014Niceties – Elizabeth Mikesch
by Laura Creste
[Calamari; 2014]
Elizabeth Mikesch’s debut Niceties, a wild and lyrical hybrid, is the rare exception in which the term poetic used to describe fiction isn’t hyperbolic. The stories feel like prose poems because they operate according to associative logic and sonic pleasures. Because Mikesch prizes sound over clarity, indefinite pronouns abound. The word it is chimerical and untraceable at times, as is the shape-shifting addressee. The opening piece “When We Were French,” is told thorough a collective voice of mothers describing their youth. The you being addressed is sometimes the women to each other, sometimes to the reader, sometimes to a nameless other. As they describe the past the speakers become the objects of memory:
We were sugar cookies, corsages, then whiffs of new perfume. We got lost in them, butonniered, and then cologned.
For the most part the stories stand alone and don’t seem to overlap in a coherent way, however the same images recur like talisman. Mikesch is interested in liminal states, particularly those of teenage girls, and the grotesqueries of the body. Teeth are often in braces; there is blood in these pages; and the sex is decidedly unsexy. Mikesch’s aversion to the color yellow resurfaces in the disparate stories, often sexualized, several times qualified as “spoiled.” She inverts traditional syntax, sometimes giving noun first then adjective, as is the rule of certain romance-languages. “Tidbits of fruit pale that swam in noontime cups.” Her words are hypnotic because she rebels against most rules of speech. Nouns are repurposed for verbs as often as they become adjectives, a litany mercifully without adverbs.
Read the rest here: http://www.full-stop.net/2014/04/22/r...
by Laura Creste
[Calamari; 2014]
Elizabeth Mikesch’s debut Niceties, a wild and lyrical hybrid, is the rare exception in which the term poetic used to describe fiction isn’t hyperbolic. The stories feel like prose poems because they operate according to associative logic and sonic pleasures. Because Mikesch prizes sound over clarity, indefinite pronouns abound. The word it is chimerical and untraceable at times, as is the shape-shifting addressee. The opening piece “When We Were French,” is told thorough a collective voice of mothers describing their youth. The you being addressed is sometimes the women to each other, sometimes to the reader, sometimes to a nameless other. As they describe the past the speakers become the objects of memory:
We were sugar cookies, corsages, then whiffs of new perfume. We got lost in them, butonniered, and then cologned.
For the most part the stories stand alone and don’t seem to overlap in a coherent way, however the same images recur like talisman. Mikesch is interested in liminal states, particularly those of teenage girls, and the grotesqueries of the body. Teeth are often in braces; there is blood in these pages; and the sex is decidedly unsexy. Mikesch’s aversion to the color yellow resurfaces in the disparate stories, often sexualized, several times qualified as “spoiled.” She inverts traditional syntax, sometimes giving noun first then adjective, as is the rule of certain romance-languages. “Tidbits of fruit pale that swam in noontime cups.” Her words are hypnotic because she rebels against most rules of speech. Nouns are repurposed for verbs as often as they become adjectives, a litany mercifully without adverbs.
Read the rest here: http://www.full-stop.net/2014/04/22/r...
Displaying 1 of 1 review