On Wonderland & Waste
Poetic narratives by Sandy Florian
With collages by Alexis Anne Mackenzie
“A bellow that is not a bucket. A bucket that is not a bone. There is wisdom in slipping into oceans. Into those wider organs horning. The way churches slip into twilight. Stone after stone. See the plaything on the mantel. I lean toward the paintings. See the baby fastened on the mast. I lean toward the window. See the sea, see the ship, see the ship’s low hull. See the winding of vowels by the function of the fist.”
Sandy Florian's On Wonderland & Waste is a novel in narratives bent on exposing the mind as an instrument of language “not entirely there.” Featuring full-color collages by Alexis Anne Mackenzie, these 12 lyrical meditations on desire, delirium, duty, and dismemberment destabilize what we can measure of the meaning underlying our experience with a visceral diction that reminds us that “the sharpest of tongues cut their own throats first.”
“The modernist impulse toward innovation and experiment alive in James Joyce's Ulysses and Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons lives on in Sandy Florian's On Wonderland & Waste. Florian writes at the leading edge of the contemporary.” —Robert Savino Oventile, Sobriquet
Sandy Florian interviews with Vincent Standley and Astrophil’s Duncan Barlow
Sandy Florian is the author Telescope (Action Books), 32 Pedals & 47 Stops (Tarpaulin Sky Press), The Tree of No (Action Books), On Wonderland & Waste (Sidebrow Books), and Prelude to Air From Water (Elixir Press). She has been awarded residencies at Caldera Arts, Stonehouse, and the Vermont Studio Center and literary prizes from Elixir Press, New Voices, and Brown University. She currently lives in San Francisco where she’s an affiliate artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts. For more information, visit her site at boxingthecompass.blogspot.com.
Alexis Anne Mackenzie has exhibited her artwork across the United States, including solo shows in San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles. She holds a B.F.A. from Tufts University/School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and her art has appeared in numerous magazines and books, including Art for Obama and The Rest Is Up To You. More of her art can be seen at www.alexisanne.com.
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