NIV: 39 & 27
BlazeVOX [books]
ISBN: 9781935402503
In Nicholas Alexander Hayes’ debut volume, the Dadaist transforms his inchoate sensibility into a form of exegesis. He re-gifts the “gift”of Gideon bibles found in motel drawers, the Baghavad-Gita handed out in airports. Sometimes damage is itself a form of readerly, writerly love. Out of the harm imposed on these holy texts a new whole emerges, transmuting received wisdom into new propositions, fully filled with the echo of the thought they both betray and express, or re-express, with a strange and haunting wisdom of their own. The result is no joke. The result is a book compulsively readable and, running counter to that fine quality, a set of sentences almost philosophical in their power—sentences which stop the reader from turning the page because the reader’s mind has suddenly been opened.
— Dan Beachy-Quick
Revising rule and ritual of the holy books, the speaker of these re-tellings drips distorted light on some of the ancient obsessions to make them appear strange in their familiarity and familiar in their strangeness. With a mathematical precision and the patience of an engineer, Nicholas Alexander Hayes’ first book offers holy enemies, licked-up Lords and unclean priests, harlot judges, names that burn,
locusts who attack lions, and borders that force peace. Here is a world where a dependence on narrative is both necessary and dangerous, where faith is a feeling to be feared.
— Daniel Borzutzky
nicholas.alexander.hayes 