Diary As Sin

by Will Alexander

Diary as Sin is the powerful and evocative story of a sand-blind girl, Rosanna Galvez. Confined to a private Catholic home in New Mexico, she unveils her beginnings as an incest baby – and moves through the odyssey beyond – with powerful incantatory language. Through poetic and often painful recall, Rosanna weaves a diary that will spellbind the reader with its imagistic and visionary prowess. Alexander cites Beckett, Bernhard and Goytisolo as an “ancestral trilology” for the work, living up to his forebears with some aplomb.

Will Alexander is known to the literary world as the avant garde poet that continually defies easy classification. Though a Los Angeles native, his work more resembles Breton, Paz, Cesaire, or Gascoyne more than anything in contemporary US poetics. Even such comparisons are glib as Alexander is that rare voice that must be experienced in its own right. For Andrew Joron he is “the fiery trickster leaping between frozen and fragmented realia, the universal translator of the multitude of tongues (both human and inhuman) emitted by the Signal of signals.” For Harryette Mullen he is “a poet whose lexicon, a ‘glossary of vertigo,’ might be culled from the complete holdings of a reconstituted Alexandrian library endowed for the next millennium.” For Nathaniel Mackey his “thicketed prose advances lexical ignitions of astounding angle and amplitude.”

“Will Alexander is a phenomenal and singular poet, a poet who allows me to leave the abyss of pedestrian sensation and enter a state of mind that thrills me with his animated breath…”
— Chris Moran, HTML Giant

174 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 31, 2011

About the author

Born in 1948, Will Alexander is a poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, visual artist and pianist. He was the recipient of a Whiting Fellowship for Poetry in 2001 and a California Arts Council Fellowship in 2002. He was also the subject of a colloquium published in the prestigious African American cultural journal, Callaloo in 1999. Author of nine previous books, Alexander has taught at various colleges including University of California, San Diego, New College (San Francisco, CA), Hofstra University, and Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, in addition to being associated with the nonprofit organization Theatre of Hearts/Youth First, serving at-risk youth. He is a lifelong resident of Los Angeles.

Reviews

[DuVay Knox · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is black experimental fiction at its best. A potent, all words-encompassing, afrosurreal drop of some of the most stimulating slop your mind kan read. Highly recommended if U R into the Surrealist form of writing. Has a little of that LEROI JONES aka AMIRI BARAKA flow to. Of course, a lotta peeps dont know that BARAKA was one of the FIRST black writers that was a part of the BEAT Movement and as such he experimented with his version of SURREALISM (read his SYSTEM OF DANTE'S HELL).
Meanwhile, WILL ALEXANDER takes what Baraka did to the next level and explodes across the page. Good shit. One of the best afrosurrealistic books I've read.

[Kashif · Rating 4 out of 5]

virtuosic