from The Boghole & the Beldame (Lune) - Softcover

Joanna Ruocco

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0996793372 ISBN 13: 9780996793377

Publisher: Lunamopolis, 2016

Synopsis

A previously unpublished selection, Joanna Ruocco's The Boghole and the Beldame is a pastoral hallucination--more spell than story--that harks back to the waking/walking life of an archetypal dreamer. Afoot in the muck of language, Ruocco paints a thicket in which every shimmering growth baffles the landscape. The characters--creatures, figures, names--in The Boghole and the Beldame lean against time, pluck it for quills, wring its veins for blue, and blush black. Ruocco knows language like the tongue knows teeth. Here is a gateway to the everywhere of your ancestral sleep.

About this title

About the Author

JOANNA RUOCCO earned an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University and a PhD in Fiction from the University of Denver. In addition to DAN (Dorothy, a publishing project, 2014), she's published several books: THE MOTHERING COVEN (Ellipsis Press), MAN'S COMPANIONS (Tarpaulin Sky Press), A COMPENDIUM OF DOMESTIC INCIDENTS (Noemi Press), and Another Governess / The Least Blacksmith: A Diptych (FC2). A COMPENDIUM OF DOMESTIC INCIDENTS won the 2009 Noemi Press Fiction Chapbook Contest (judged by Rikki Ducornet). Another Governess / The Least Blacksmith: A Diptych won the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize (judged by Ben Marcus). She also works pseudonymously as Alessandra Shahbaz (Ghazal in the Moonlight, Midnight Flame) and Toni Jones (No Secrets in Spandex). She co-edits Birkensnake, a fiction journal, with Brian Conn.

Review

"To read Joanna Ruocco is a good time. A racy one (nouns and verbs do not stay in their clothes!). But what is more, the keening logic that undercurrents JR's dazzling language in The Boghole and the Beldame is no less than a short course in the cartography of transfiguration. The "likes" and the "unlikes," like otherworldly pearls that weight the story's threads, are indicators of a deep pulse-motor churning in the guts below the text's surface. And so we move closer to something more like the consciousness of the rhizome. One resulting gift? The glorious invitation to consider relational modes that open us, rather than close us, into all that is not known."-- Selah Saterstrom

About this edition

• Publisher: Lunamopolis
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0996793372
• ISBN 13: 9780996793377
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 28