Ultravioleta

by Laura Moriarty

Fiction. "ULTRAVIOLETA is in the first place a mind that is spacious, with spangled depths on the order of William Blake and Phillip K. Dick. Our Mental Travelers are shining, friendly, off-hand and amorous astronauts, humans, monsters, aliens, and constructions, and they move through the galaxy on wings of a consciousness that is more than permeable...[Moriarty] has invented a new kind of tale in which the materiality of language and the magic of story combine in ever more wondrous agreements"--Robert Gluck. Laura Moriarty has taught at Naropa University and Mills College, and is currently the Deputy Director for Small Press Distribution.

Genres: Fiction, Poetry, Science Fiction

262 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

There is more than one author with this name

Laura Moriarty’s books include A Tonalist an essay poem from Nightboat Books, the novels, Cunning and Ultravioleta. A Semblance: Selected and New Poems, 1975 – 2007 came out from Omnidawn in 2007. Who That Divines is forthcoming from Nightboat Books. She is the author of ten other books of poetry going back to 1980. She won the Poetry Center Book Award in 1983, a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award in Poetry in 1992, a New Langton Arts Award in Literature 1998 and a Fund for Poetry grant in 2007. She has taught at Mills College and Naropa University, among other places, and is Deputy Director of Small Press Distribution. For more, see the blog A Tonalist Notes.

Photo by Marc Lecard.

Reviews

[Cleverusername · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm going decidedly middle of the road on Ultravioleta, here. This is a book that I came across almost entirely by chance (no, really. I just found it lying around, one day) and decided would be worth a look. Upon my first read, this book was nigh unreadable. I found it hard to follow, difficult to understand, and approaching incomprehensible.

I put it down after a single chapter.

...but for some reason, I couldn't just get rid of it. This book followed me around for two years, and I just didn't want to get rid of it. For some reason. Well, I'm glad I did... because I eventually revisited it as a much more mature sort of reader, and managed to finally work out what it is: conceptual literature. The way it's written is fragmented, managing the sort of insight without thought that you'd normally hear from the mouths of hipsters the world over. It pushes these philosophies and makes seemingly random observations and rivers of thought that should be tiring after a while... but they aren't. It's stream-of-consciousness literature taken to a whole new extreme, and that's not for everyone. Hell, it's barely for me. Three stars, though. It's intriguing, and Laura Moriarty has my respect for producing a book this innovative.

[Shawn · Rating 1 out of 5]

I can't read this any longer. The writing style is pretty much unreadable.