Clog

by Grant Maierhofer, Sean Kilpatrick (Editor), New Juche (Illustrator)

CLOG, the sister book to 2017's GAG. Unmitigated dinge and tremolo blur prose with derelict photographs by New Juche.

300 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2018

Reviews

[Kelby Losack · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clog is something beyond prose or fiction. It's a visual, emotional, psychological experience. I dig it.

[John Trefry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another step away into the musique concrete of Maierhofer's singular prose bringing to life that alienation and dissolution of the greyed out mind of a damaged soul, perhaps the narrator of the sister text GAG, now an adult, perhaps Leatherface with a Youtube addiction, perhaps just the linguistic cartography of grime. So inhuman that it is achingly poignant.

[Christian Molenaar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Grant Maierhofer's writing often feels to me like a continuation of Beckett's formal concerns, furthering the late Irish master's detachment from plot, character and setting to work with textual concepts as pure objects. It's a style Maierhofer previously explored and exploded in the obtuse GAG, forgoing even the most basic of syntactical rules in favor of an amorphous mass of text verging on the unreadable. CLOG, Maierhofer's followup, reins in the proceedings (but just barely) to the reader's great benefit, even introducing rudimentary characters in the form of a vessel known simply as H. plus cameos from writers like Joan Vollmer and Raduan Nassar. It may sound counterintuitive, but after completely demolishing the very act of writing in GAG, the inclusion of even one character in Maierhofer's dense verbal melange represents expansion on a cosmic scale, as if the universe launched in GAG's big bang has developed life in the time between publishing.