Reviews - Marco Giovenale



Marco Giovenale: Anachromisms (Ahsahta Press)
This is the best thing since Google invented auto-complete but an auto-complete which would be driven by a highly deranged algorithm. This new algorithm is powered by Marco Giovenale's integrative inspiration which moves around like a desperate "Super Mario" capturing, here and there, coins and badges (read phrases and images). The items may seem loose or disconnected, as Super Marco is a massively heterogeneous collector. Nevertheless, if you are no plumber yourself and love all sorts of leaks happening, you will surely enjoy taking "laser showers" or peeing into "a flash memorial urinal with led display". Moving through these flashy surroundings,  Super Marco does not provide any instructions and does not give a faq. He won't help you in this storyless ride on his bumpy, roller-coaster poetry. "A full bath will empty in 45 minutes" is no problem for Super plumber who deep dives into colourless territories with his "scuba suit" and some "archaic html tags" leading the reader through a sparkling and epileptogenic journey. So be prepared to meet a wild bunch of masked or faceless characters but also giant bunnies, vampires, zombies and robots. At this stage, I will not comment on the neo-chomskyan or post-adornian nature of this book as personnally, I am a great fan of ctulhu pets and bmw gorillas.




Marco Giovenale: A Gunless Tea (Dusie)
What the author is doing in this book is unveiling the big secret of crypticism. What I have mistakenly called a book is a mixture of ready-written materials and found writing. You may argue that those bits are stitched so carefully that even a close reading can hardly tell which is which. Nevermind. This "non-book" is more than disconcerting, clashing unexpected words together, nicely googlinking antagonistic sentences. Marco Giovenale is somehow extracting bizarre bits and pieces from the darkest crypts of a) our minds, b) our lives, c) our nightmares (tick as appropriate)  and creating a sort of monster. Marco Giovenale is a kind (of) Prof. Frankenstein, who - as a former bookshop keeper- knows the best places where to dig out the most sombre and awkward pieces of fiction and non-fiction. I suppose this is the answer to a question I did not raise: How can you "bury the dead (if) they'll live again"? . This non-book is unburied, out there walking amongst the living and probably the non-living readers as well, delivering its cryptic and gunless message. A blurred message made of constant adjustment, altering its meaning as the reader progresses through this chaotic and heterogeneous text: a mixture of alien tongues, ape signs, voodoo gestures, telepathic thoughts, historical criticism and other undecipherable stuff... which actually read in a smooth and unchaotic manner only slightly perturbed by an unexpected punctuation. Clearly, the monster may frighten off quite a few readers but those who will approach it may enjoy its discrete humour and its powerful visions.


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