Morpheu

"From political change to pocket change, shipments to shipwrecks, quotations to digital code, Alejandro Crawford never met a morphosis he didn't like, and here in these pages neither will you. Skipping from 'omicron' to 'omg' to 'ominous gold,' Morpheu cuts across registers from syllable to syllable, breaking the surface of language to reveal the golden (and sometime ominous) connections between postmodern assemblage and modernist source text (the work is based in part on the Brazilian/Portuguese journal Orpheu , which notably published the work of Fernando Pessoa). The text moves between English and Portuguese, and between the ecstatic linguistic play of Dionysian disruptions and the classical Apollonian concern with measure and a masterfully careful calibration of sound. Here, the two gods of Orpheus vie, and Crawford reveals that in the end, once the dust and tears have settled, they may merely be heteronyms of the same muse. Fragments and pathos: the stones are crying, the limbs tearing -- remember the lesson of Orpheus and keep reading: don't, whatever you do, dare to look back"--Craig Dworkin.