cover image Aquamarine: Final Tales of the Revolution

Aquamarine: Final Tales of the Revolution

Peter Pessl, , trans. from the German by Mark Kanak. . Twisted Spoon, $14.50 (155pp) ISBN 978-80-86264-28-8

If you've ever dropped acid in the desert with a cabal of mad poets, Pessl's wacky trip through Mexico may feel familiar. Broken into seven stories featuring Marine and Aquamarine, the book is chockablock with dreamy imagery—“kissing her fleetingly, beneath her leg-colored fur skirt, waiting to remember, to forget, and indeed, staring along with an endlessly fixed stare, staring at it through that lemon-colored glass”—that leads nowhere. A noted poet, Pessl (and translator Kanak) can string together images for a few pages—blood and gore take over one of the book's more coherent sections—but there is no real entry point for readers, and after a few dozen pages very little reason to continue seeking them. In his preface, Kanak writes, “All are revealed in a sort of dark, flaming thicket of imagery that is the heart of the text, a disconcerting puzzle, pieces of a whole spread out in confusion and madness.” In other words, readers may do well to take Marine's advice: “We will no longer try to understand.” (Nov.)