Books
Soul, Ghost,
My Absolute
“The night before it will have been my animal self, that pure expression. Moon. Impasse.”
Eleven fictions that call forth Vesuvius erupting, the mythical Lilith, Mussolini on his rise to power, the Angel of Nagasaki, dangerous invitations, old laments, anomalous perceptions, and alchemical nights.
The
Absent
“When the book broke apart, I was able to read it.”
The Absent’s themes are one and many, connecting as they are layered: early photography, 19th Century Philadelphia, westward expansion, the resonant voices of women, the fusion of landscape and man, grief and mourning, memento mori. Traveling between east and west and interior and exterior, Rosalind Palermo Stevenson’s poetic prose narrative is a meditation driven by its photographer narrator’s desire to render, with his mind and with his camera, what is absent present.
Kafka At
Rudolf Steiner’s
“But before that will be my last dream. A ridiculous and meaningless dream. It will be of shirts, a strange sight to see them.”
Writing in the persona of Franz Kafka, Rosalind Palermo Stevenson explores Kafka’s visit to Rudolf Steiner when Steiner was in Prague delivering a series of lectures on the subject An Occult Physiology, and Kafka’s idealized love affair with a young Italian girl during his ten-day stay at a sanatorium in Riva. A chapbook with the gravitas of a short novel, this poetic prose narrative is deeply interior and at the same time darkly historical.
Insect Dreams
“…and then the sounds begin to reach her: the violent beating of wings, a breeze rising up, a bird gliding on wing…”
Inspired by the life and work of the seventeenth century artist and entomologist Maria Sibylla Merian and the two-year period she spent studying the insects of Surinam, this novella is a poetic rather than a purely historical rendering. Maria Sibylla Merian did live from 1647 to 1717, and did leave the city of Amsterdam in the year 1699 to travel by ship to Surinam. She did go into the jungle to conduct her work; she did get Malaria; she did encounter the conditions of slavery under the Dutch; she did cut short her stay. These are the bones of the piece, but the flesh on the bones is imagined.