The Distance, and You In It by Alexander Dickow

Some say we live in foolish times, but I’ve been a fool all my life, and I say these times are not foolish enough. Fortunately, Alexander Dickow’s The Distance, and You In It can help with that. We need only turn to Hob, the pro/antagonist of this narrative, to be put completely at sixes and sevens. Garish Hob, merry shapeshifter of no fixed form or gender, interferes in the courtship of Anah and Aviv. This romance—no, this comedy of errors—no, this farce in verse—captures our long moment in terms both fantastical and firmly grounded in reality. Full of delicious wordplay (and swordplay), a dizzying grammar that draws us right in amongst the characters, and even a surprise at the end, The Distance, and You In It delivers a seriously tongue-in-cheek model for navigating lives gone beyond our control ad absurdum. If it takes a fool to get us through the farce beyond these pages, then Dickow’s Hob is one to learn from: “Patchwork and fictional, true,/ Impure, together and utterly One.”

—Jay Besemer


What to make of The Distance, and You In It? Part creation myth, part rewrite of A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, part riff on Paradise Lost, it is also a closet drama, a satire, a mischievous set of verbal games balanced precariously between lyric and narrative. Dickow’s Hob is both Oberon and Puck, and reminds me of Harold Bloom’s mad reading of trickster Yahweh in the Hebrew Scriptures. His lovers are touching and adventurous. Awash in rhyme and scintillating word play, this book-length poem is a sheer delight—charming, always reminding us that a charm is a magic spell.

—Norman Finkelstein


Alexander Dickow had me with a cosmogony both contemporary and classic, introducing a play Shakespearean in scope, with rhymes, songs, internal monologues, impossible to stage but vividly imagined scenes and settings.  Think a big budget experimental film with excellent costuming but also lack thereof, with lyric passages, surprise, and hardship; a multiplex movie theatre serving breakfast cereal with marshmallows, and a thesaurus of footwear, and enjoy!

—Catherine Anne Daly


I is an other, Rimbaud says. Is the other also an I? Is the other also an eye? O say can you see… I am writing this blurb on a cold, snowy day in suburban Michigan, unbearably clear and bright, on which it seems possible to see everything that has happened and will, caught in a terrible knot. And here is the great Alex Dickow sitting alongside me, offering all of desire and all of despair, caught in a terrible knot: “That which I would soon be / Reached its future hand inside the soup / Just prior to myself / And plucked out what would then become itself: / Me.” He starts his song there, like Rimbaud ransacking the Men’s Warehouse for a set of wrinkle proof slacks. And if the polyester blend fits, bear it. As you can see, each time I pick up this book, it makes me want to write such drunken, capsized sentences. Reader beware: you too will be capsized and intoxicated.
 
—Toby Altman


Alexander Dickow grew up in Moscow, Idaho, in the rolling hills of the Palouse region in the Pacific Northwest. He is professor of French at Virginia Tech, and writes poetry, fiction, essays and literary criticism in French and English. His books of poetry include Caramboles (bilingual, Argol Editions, 2008), Trial Balloons (chapbook, Corrupt Press, 2012), and Appetites (MadHat Press, 2018). Works in French include a novel, Le Premier Souper (La Volte, 2021), a hybrid work in poetic prose called Rhapsodie curieuse (diospyros kaki) (Louise Bottu, 2017), and a book of critical fragments and aphorisms, Déblais(Louise Bottu, 2021). Dickow is also a translator; his full-length translations include works by Max Jacob, Sylvie Kandé, Gustave Roud, and Henri Droguet. His scholarship usually involves French poetry of the 20th and 21st centuries, and occasionally cinema or weird fiction.


Book Information:

· Paperback: 116 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-491-8

$18