Plats

Critical Impressions:
"Depersonalization and derealization are cardinal features of the schizophrenic experience. In Plats we enter into this anxiety-provoking, frightening world. It's a fascinating, disquieting journey.”
-Dr. Kayla Bernheim, author of "Schizophrenia: Symptoms, Causes, Treatments"

"One of the most original meditations on sensory experience I can recall reading."
- Joe Milazzo, author of "Crepescule W/ Nellie"

"Elusive and amorphous as the whistle of a distant train, yet hard-hitting as the train itself, Plats is the braiding of unfettered thought and structured design. Architect and poet come together in this superbly beautiful and disturbing journey whose imagery seduces the reader into a troubled, haunting world."
-Susan Crawford, author of "The Pocket Wife"


The first novel by American writer, John Trefry, 'Plats' is a meditation on life in Los Angeles. In the tradition of the prose form-making of Michel Butor, 'Plats' is a masonry text built of modular narrative elements and settings, a textual city to be explored by the reader, where in a single breath coexist dusty apartments and vacant beaches, reinvention and suicide, haunting and hiding, endless labor and crippling idleness, mint tea and storm waters.

The city changes secretly, behind layers of paint and pelts of mildew. Against this stagnant backdrop, inhabitants struggle to observe the passage of their lives.

With the hypnotic action of a rising and falling tide, the reader floats through a suite of interchangeable women looking for escape in place-names, in the changing minutiae of their skin and clothing, in the hydrological cycle of a seaside desert, and in the possibilities apparent in one another's lives. They steal each other's shoes, mail, apartments, and identities with the hope of getting one step closer to distinguishing themselves from the refuse of the unchanging city.

John Trefry lives and works in Lawrence, Kansas.