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Pool Party Trap Loop
Schism Press
The fresh, previously unheard notes in Ben Segal’s brain-feverish surrealism arrive in the reader’s mind with an audaciously hypercompact lyricism, and his sentences dart straight to the heart . Pool Party Trap Loop ’s expertly miniaturized fictions of bodily havoc, of messily human collision, introduce Ben Segal as a vital and original voice.
– Garielle Lutz
Suppose every fable is tired. One’s been the child painter for years. Another the Worm King for every dream. Over there is the girl who can’t drown. Down in the vacuum are the people living by cards. Up on the Ferris wheel is the wrestler in a red signet that matches his beard. In the end it’s all another legacy, another trial, a true life. In this mischievously enchanting collection, Ben Segal knows that tinsel rusts, and that’s when things get real-hearted. A clear-colored sadness leaks from real bodies and philosophies. The ghosts are here, but they live in buckets. The squirrels are dead, but they live in jackets. What they all sing for is to be at peace, and Ben Segal gets it all on spools of fugue.
– Mike Young
Pool Party Trap Loop is a collection of captivating stories sheathed in grammatical glitz. In each of these narrative nuggets Segal exploits form and conceit while simultaneously tightrope walking the excitingly dangerous arena of the artful sentence.… Segal’s work stands alone in its strange, winding, sudden candor. Pool Party Trap Loop is a collection for the intellectually adventurous and the unafraid. The sentence level beauty and large-scale conceit ingenuity make it a serious read that requires, between stories, even more serious pause. Reading Pool Party Trap Loop is wounding to the memory – it’s a collection that will pull you in, swirl you around, and spit you out mangled and changed.
– Rita Bullwinkle , Full Stop Magazine
The stories that Segal writes reflect each other, sometimes in mirrored pairs. But where palindromes create an illusion of order by deforming words, Segal assembles elegant words to evoke a fucked up reality. More than anything, Ben Segal reminds me of a young Raymond Queneau. Except he’s not French. And he’s alive.
– Michael Vegas Mussman , Pank Magazine
Pool Party Trap Loop is a palindrome and a nightmare. … I, a mere outsider looking in, would classify this as a book that is far more about traps and loops than pools or parties. Perhaps pools and parties enter the equation from time to time, but this is a book devoted to the lure, to the art of ensnarement, with body horror its most frequent loop….[Segal] has created a dazzling world.
– Carolyn DeCarlo , Heavy Feather Review
If the stories in Pool Party Trap Loop are a full-frontal attack – which I believe they are – the attack is not on the reader, but rather on the larger constructs that affect the way we fuck and think and speak. Its purpose is to remind us that language, sex, violence, and even issues of conduct are inescapable and intractable, the only thing worth acknowledging, deserving of both our respect and contempt. If surrealism seems to suggest freedom and liberation, Ben’s work conversely demonstrates a series of structures – ethical, societal, linguistic – crashing into each other in ways that may be shocking, but make complete and absolute sense when set against the lattice of rules that govern and fragment our daily lives.
– Keith McCleary , Electric Literature
The fresh, previously unheard notes in Ben Segal’s brain-feverish surrealism arrive in the reader’s mind with an audaciously hypercompact lyricism, and his sentences dart straight to the heart . Pool Party Trap Loop ’s expertly miniaturized fictions of bodily havoc, of messily human collision, introduce Ben Segal as a vital and original voice.
– Garielle Lutz
Suppose every fable is tired. One’s been the child painter for years. Another the Worm King for every dream. Over there is the girl who can’t drown. Down in the vacuum are the people living by cards. Up on the Ferris wheel is the wrestler in a red signet that matches his beard. In the end it’s all another legacy, another trial, a true life. In this mischievously enchanting collection, Ben Segal knows that tinsel rusts, and that’s when things get real-hearted. A clear-colored sadness leaks from real bodies and philosophies. The ghosts are here, but they live in buckets. The squirrels are dead, but they live in jackets. What they all sing for is to be at peace, and Ben Segal gets it all on spools of fugue.
– Mike Young
Pool Party Trap Loop is a collection of captivating stories sheathed in grammatical glitz. In each of these narrative nuggets Segal exploits form and conceit while simultaneously tightrope walking the excitingly dangerous arena of the artful sentence.… Segal’s work stands alone in its strange, winding, sudden candor. Pool Party Trap Loop is a collection for the intellectually adventurous and the unafraid. The sentence level beauty and large-scale conceit ingenuity make it a serious read that requires, between stories, even more serious pause. Reading Pool Party Trap Loop is wounding to the memory – it’s a collection that will pull you in, swirl you around, and spit you out mangled and changed.
– Rita Bullwinkle , Full Stop Magazine
The stories that Segal writes reflect each other, sometimes in mirrored pairs. But where palindromes create an illusion of order by deforming words, Segal assembles elegant words to evoke a fucked up reality. More than anything, Ben Segal reminds me of a young Raymond Queneau. Except he’s not French. And he’s alive.
– Michael Vegas Mussman , Pank Magazine
Pool Party Trap Loop is a palindrome and a nightmare. … I, a mere outsider looking in, would classify this as a book that is far more about traps and loops than pools or parties. Perhaps pools and parties enter the equation from time to time, but this is a book devoted to the lure, to the art of ensnarement, with body horror its most frequent loop….[Segal] has created a dazzling world.
– Carolyn DeCarlo , Heavy Feather Review
If the stories in Pool Party Trap Loop are a full-frontal attack – which I believe they are – the attack is not on the reader, but rather on the larger constructs that affect the way we fuck and think and speak. Its purpose is to remind us that language, sex, violence, and even issues of conduct are inescapable and intractable, the only thing worth acknowledging, deserving of both our respect and contempt. If surrealism seems to suggest freedom and liberation, Ben’s work conversely demonstrates a series of structures – ethical, societal, linguistic – crashing into each other in ways that may be shocking, but make complete and absolute sense when set against the lattice of rules that govern and fragment our daily lives.
– Keith McCleary , Electric Literature
111 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2015
18 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
October 18, 2024
Hell yeah! That was a wild ride. These stories are short. Like, super short. Like, Matthew Bartlett's first collection level short. That's a good thing, it feels like a quick salvia trip every time. There's also something captivating about finding an amazing book that seems virtually unknown. It has been out a decade and according to GR, only five people have read it (I'm number six lol). It makes it feel like the book must have slipped free of an alternate timeline and I have one of the rare copies. And the dude in the author photo looks dead inside, I refuse to believe he exists in my universe.
I also like that the title is a palindrome. But tbh, they could have given it the even cooler title of Poop Party Trap Poop and still been a palindrome but whatever, I've accepted that other people are never as artsy as me.
I also like that the title is a palindrome. But tbh, they could have given it the even cooler title of Poop Party Trap Poop and still been a palindrome but whatever, I've accepted that other people are never as artsy as me.
March 31, 2025
How have I only heard of Ben Segal in the past few months?
These stories seem to come from a sidebar meeting of Ben Marcus and Gary Shipley at that not-famous hootenanny of precious postmodernists Bartheleme organized … or was late getting to because he was fixing a flat in Lubbock.
These stories seem to come from a sidebar meeting of Ben Marcus and Gary Shipley at that not-famous hootenanny of precious postmodernists Bartheleme organized … or was late getting to because he was fixing a flat in Lubbock.
December 21, 2015
Been a while since I read something fucking weird. Reminds me of some of the segments of Naked Lunch but somehow both more surreal and less obtuse, in that they have structure and forward momentum and some of them even have fairly clear 'points'.
A few I just don't get, and I'm not sure whether that's my fault or the book's, but happily they're a minority and even the weaker pieces contain some stellar turns of phrase.
My favourite was probably 'EXERCISES', one of those irritating stories that reminds you of things you've tried to write in the past, but is infinitely better.
A few I just don't get, and I'm not sure whether that's my fault or the book's, but happily they're a minority and even the weaker pieces contain some stellar turns of phrase.
My favourite was probably 'EXERCISES', one of those irritating stories that reminds you of things you've tried to write in the past, but is infinitely better.
September 9, 2016
“The worst part of catastrophe is the normalcy that settles in after,” one narrator suggests toward the collection’s close. It’s the fear of complacency that fuels this little pink book’s fevered engines.
Reviewed for Electric Literature (by me).
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews