Walking Dreams
A man tries to piece together the events of the day he nearly
died. Another believes that a friend has betrayed him, or is it
that he has betrayed himself? A woman tries to escape the life
she has known, but finds it following her. The eight stories of
disorientation and metamorphosis in Mark Wallace’s Walking
Dreams all concern characters who feel trapped and want to change
who they are. The unconventional shape of these tales distorts
time, place, and character to create an eerie and threatening
atmosphere. The result is a series of surprises– some serious,
some comic–in which the boundary between the real and the
imagined breaks down. In the tradition of what British writer
Robert Aickman called “the strange story,” Walking
Dreams explores a world that is poetic, horrifying, and very much
like our own.
Mark Wallace writes like an avant-garde poet who knows how to
tell a good story. Or like a fiction writer who knows how to fill
his prose with cutting edge poetry. You finish Wallace’s
fiction with much more than you began with, the sense that your
reading intelligence has been scrambled into a new kind of clarity,
a new kind of pleasure that can only be fully sorted out over
time.
Stephen-Paul Martin
Mark Wallace is the author of more than ten books and chapbooks
of poetry, including Nothing Happened and Besides
I Wasn't There and Sonnets of a Penny-A-Liner.
Temporary Worker Rides A Subway won the 2002
Gertrude Stein Poetry Award and was published by Green Integer
Books. His multi-genre work Haze (Edge
Books) was published in 2004, and his first collection of
fiction, The Big Lie, was published by Avec
Books in Fall 2000. His critical articles and reviews have
appeared in numerous publications. Along with Steven Marks, he
edited Telling It Slant: Avant Garde Poetics of the 1990s
(University of Alabama Press) a collection of
26 essays by different writers on the subject of contemporary
avant garde poetry and poetics. With Juliana Spahr, Kristin Prevallet,
and Pam Rehm he edited A Poetics of Criticism,
a collection of poetry essays in non-standard formats published
by Leave Books. He runs the Ruthless Grip Poetry
Series and the "dcpoets" e-mail list in
Washington, D.C., where he teaches at area colleges including
Georgetown University, The George Washington University, and American
University.
Book Information:
· Paperback: 108 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] (April 2007)
· ISBN: 1-934289-26-4
$15
