Truth, War, and the Dream-Game: Selected Prose Poems and Parables, 1966-1990

A dynamically shifting vision of the world made visible in intricate explorations that seem to recall Kafka’s castle halls, and the twists and turns in Borges’s labyrinth.

Utilizing the ancient tradition of the parable, Lawrence Fixel presents narrators in settings with which they are uncomfortable, in situations they don’t understand, confronting a range of potential resolutions that somehow obliquely reflect the issues and values of our peculiar time and place.

With uncompromising curiosity and ferocious intelligence, Fixel’s essays, parables and prose poems take part the everyday world in order to examine its most basic building blocks, to turn them this way and that, to imagine how they might have been regarded in the time of the Pharaohs, or to conjure up a reality without them. The most insignificant object or act—a shovel, a key, a knock on a door—becomes the starting point for an exploration into the nature of existence itself.

Fixel ( Through Deserts of Snow ) is both a riddler and scholar of "the question of how things get from here to there." In quizzical, contemplative prose poems and parables, he presents characters in transit, and deftly illuminates the complex of enigmas and paradoxes inherent in their often simple journeys. In "Give Up, Give Up," travel is transgression. When approached by a uniformed man, the tale's narrator--an "unarmed 'wanderer' " in a strange city--responds with automatic wariness, remembering "stories of vagrants being jailed, sentenced to hard labor." Even non-physical ventures engage this visitor/violator duality. For the narrator of "The Invaders," simple mental distraction/drifting off leads not only "somewhere else" but to someone else, proving that self is full of others who are potential enemies. Fixel is most intriguing when he transports these conundrums to a political realm. "The Situation Room" makes thinly veiled reference to the U.S.'s botched hostage rescue mission in 1980. Written in 1980, the piece seems disturbingly prescient of American military evolution toward the Gulf war and, like much of Fixel's writing, contains implications that far exceed the boundaries of the parable's scaled-down proportions.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This collection by San Francisco poet Fixel ( The Book of Glimmers , Cloud Marauder Pr., 1979) includes 90 essays, parables, and prose poems in the first person that form three separate texts written over a period of 20 years. Each piece places the narrator in a situation where reality and perceived reality are ambiguous. Somewhat reminiscent of Kafka's style, Fixel's prose is straightforward narration of everyday events, which in the telling becomes an exploration of the internal stream of consciousness. In the afterword, Fixel provides some thematic groupings of the pieces to further provoke and challenge established assumptions. Thus, the complete text evolves as a "work in progress" and serves as an example of an alternative literary genre. Recommended for collections that support creative writing.
- Denise Sticha, Carnegie Lib. of Pittsburgh
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.