And then Blake Butler

Blake Butler has a good name. Two B's for alliteration and, folded-in, 2 L's. Two short words poetic, and sayable as hell.

To read Scorch Atlas is to have your brain rattled. Words come and go and mean what meaning's made. Not what you thought. The whole reads like a poem. There is a rhythm. Something distinct, and an inner melody. Words become stoppers, turn inside out, hand on a drum face to stop the beat. Turn up the heat.

There is repetition. Oh, there is repetition. A fanning, like kaleidoscopes or a butterfly of evil. In the background there is Poe. His heart beats through the bloated corpses, and his old eye stares. The bats have left the belltower, and the tower has crumpled to the floor, into its own core.

***

To read Scorch Atlas and but criticise its constant battering, its doom, its smell of putrefaction and decay is to have choked on it, to have retired senseless. But not all sense at all was lost. In this split this-ness after what appalled, a critique must take a crick into account; a crooked language, now deranged. The disruption and suture of mental viscera.

The words have been inverted, lost forgotten, sense unmembered, misremembered, in dismemberment unrendered. This is the gift of BB's scorching, a cleansing of the palate and a lethal torching. The where of unfound poetry, their seams like shark jaw scars, the rhythm of humanity, at the sun edge of extremity, knit back with bloody char.