The White Visitation

Not since the Book of Ecclesiastes has such litany been deployed to smack dab us with a wall of words. In The White Visitation, David Brennan pressure treats language, syntax, grammar, content into a layered labyrinthine quilted fabric of strata. One doesn't so much as read as one peels, strips, skins the text-a sonic archeology, a narrative dig. Nothing new under the sun? Don't count on it. The White Visitation is the plasma at the sun's very core. -Michael Martone, author of Michael Martone "The joy of finders keepers!" suffuses The White as we read we are whisked past poets and poems real and imagined, kudzu, fowl flying free, bedhead, a scull on the Arno, a squawky holiday high school marching band, and all manner of additional visions. Brennan is alive to the glories of surfeit, but also aware of our irritable need to catalog and categorize, and therein lies the rub of his book, from which sparks of music and wit burst at every turn. -Joel Brouwer A flaneur, a funky symptom, the Empire striking back, punctuation, ruliness, Mr. Death Himself-The White Visitation is that queer Everything, the Void from which all contents (and colors) run. Pitching suavely and ludicrously among orders, not of knowledge, but of order, this unraveling and ravenous tautology hurtles along on index and citation, limit and inversion, lust and dust, parody and rue. A ryght plesaunte book. -Joyelle McSweeney