Soul, Ghost, My Absolute
“Or when the mind draws a blank and all I have is that blankness at the entrance to the tunnel where there have been episodes of the fantastic, droll nights, the things I never told you when we were living in the city of Merci at the time of the bomb. The mornings were dark then as if it might rain. Cats lived in the alleyways where the pedestrians walked taking their shortcuts. Angel, you were the executioner’s angel.
Putti, les amours, the loves,
later and nothing,
if I stare with the stare of a stranger.
The glow of my hand in the light of a candle. Lessons of the invisible. Grieved one. To begin with the oldest angels.”
From “Dusk, The Angelus” in Soul, Ghost, My Absolute
Published by: Rain Mountain Press
Publication Date: August 25, 2024
Category: Fiction/Prose Poetry
Style: Written at the intersection of prose and poetry, experimental, multiple forms
Number of Pages: 91
PURCHASE FROM: Rain Mountain Press; Order from Local Bookstore; Amazon
PRAISE
“For years I’ve been dreaming of a collection of stories by Rosalind Palermo Stevenson, a writer of immense daring, attentiveness, and grace. Soul, Ghost, My Absolute fulfills this dream. Like the magical Wak-Wak Tree described in its pages, it blossoms with strange enchantments: demon lovers, buried gardens, restless oceans, and above all, language—a ceaseless music that delights as it beckons us into mystery.”
~ SOFIA SAMATAR, author of The White Mosque and The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain
“The in between, the transitory, what is absent, or lost―the focus of Rosalind Palermo Stevenson’s stunning new short fiction collection. She asks: Is what we feel more real than reality itself? She answers through dreams, apparitions, love, memory, longing, and spirituality. Palermo Stevenson is a master of the unseen, the glimpsed and the overlooked, trees, a woman, a man, dogs, children, a bird. She is unafraid of dichotomies, distilling what is important in life by viewing what is beyond death to attain beauty.”
– LAURIE BLAUNER, author of Out of Which Came Nothing and The Solace of Monsters
“Rosalind Palermo Stevenson’s writing is often dreamlike, verbal visions that evoke alternative realities that enjoy their own visionary possibilities. She accomplishes this sensation though her unique use of language, sentences whose rhythms are mesmerizing, the objects of their content not quite solidly there, as if being observed through a haze of consciousness… These are language pieces that access realms beyond that of most fiction. The “My Absolute” aspect of the title suggests the philosophical context of the “absolute” that refers to ultimate reality or truth that exists independently of human perception or understanding. Stevenson seeks language to convey such a reality.”
– WALTER CUMMINS, California Review of Books
(read full review here)
“Rosalind Palermo Stevenson’s recent release, Soul, Ghost, My Absolute, brings the reader into the authors streaming world of words rounding bends, straits, splashing outcrops in imagery, metaphor and poetics… There is a lot of ground covered in these short bursts. Beginning with the Wak-Wak Tree yielding human fruit in various stages of development to characters in the other pieces, such as the pale teenager who appears and disappears, fire, haunted houses, odd turtles, train stations, rotting structures, Ibis, landfills and scrapheaps… Palermo Stevenson is a master of imagery laced with metaphor bound in a surrealist casing.”
– g emil reutter, North of Oxford
(read full review here)
“Stevenson’s previous books always have evoked dreamy sensations that take you to unexpected places and Soul, Ghost, My Absolute is no exception. The title story, which I am reading for the fourth time, is like an inner movie assembled from film clips… an imagistic evocation of scenes, places, and people that are both extraneous to the words on the page and yet intimately connected… films seen long ago that I thought of as I read: The old man in the woods remembering his youthful love in Wild Strawberries, moments from Scenes from a Summer Night and Through a Glass Darkly… and before long we are in another Stevenson story, in an actual film script, ‘The Foghorn’ that is a textured kind of dream that suggests the cited quote, “The dream is true. All dreams are true.” (Antonin Artaud)… There is, literally, a split screen, dual narrative [The Guest], and a brief tale, ‘Valcour Island’ which feels like the Poe fragment, ‘The Lighthouse’ (or the incomparable, eerie movie, The Lighthouse). The people, the evocations of places in Soul, Ghost, My Absolute are in and out of time, incandescent on the one hand, oddly forbidden on the other.”
– Alan Catlin, Alan Catlin, Misfit Magazine