Skin Prayer - Softcover

Rice, Doug

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0971357277 ISBN 13: 9780971357273

Publisher: Eraserhead Press, 2002

Synopsis

Doug Rice is haunted-by what we can only guess. He is trapped; he goes nowhere. He is a modern day hysteric, a psychoanalyst's dream. He writes the same thing over and over, runs the same spinning track, as if somehow, through the repetition of extremes, he could eliminate the trauma, break its foul-smelling, icy-fingered spell. Only it is a spell of beauty --the beauty that comes from devastation, from the constant struggle to rise again in that roaring fire's shouldered wake. You will find no plot or answers here, only the unbearable loss of abandonment and grief. Make no mistake: Doug Rice kills us again and again and he does not want us to survive it, for he has been burned at the stake and is burning still. He is a ghost who can do nothing but plead with his bones and remind us with the choking beauty ghosts bring. Despite his pleas, you will not like him. You will not like him, and yet . . .Skin Prayer is the power of redemption in the word when life has failed us. It has no inside or outside, it is only itself. It is the self-enclosed, hermetic world of obsessive need, a space where one can't breath. And yet it is breath. In its own suffocated space, if we survive it, or are patient enough not to throw it aside, it gives us insufferable hope.

About this title

About the Author

Doug Rice is the author of Blood of Mugwump: A Tiresian Tale of Incest (FC2/Black Ice Books) and A Good Cuntboy is Hard to Find (CPAOD Books). He is also a co-editor of Federman: A to X-X-X-X (San Diego State University Press). He has been the publisher and editor of Nobodaddies: A Journal of Pirated Texts and Flesh and is now beginning a new publishing house, Viral Publications. Currently, he is working on Thunder Comes From This My House. His work has appeared in numerous anthologies and journals. He teaches fiction writing at California State University, Sacramento.

Edition details

• Publisher: Eraserhead Press
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0971357277
• ISBN 13: 9780971357273
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 232