Collected Experimentalisms: 2005-2008

Over the course of a year, U. G. Világos awoke every night half an hour before midnight and left home. On these long, nightly walks he would venture into the desolate, remote wildnerness around his tent and write. Világos has previously spoken of these walks as an attempt to 'create a field recording of life that lives when the living sleep.' Dense, lyrical, mysterious, these notes provide further glimpse into the life of a recluse examining the recluse of life.

About the Author :
U. G. Világos is a poet, editor, and teacher. His new collection, The Sensible Archetypes of a God, is forthcoming in Winter 2023, and a collection of flash-poems titled Troubles, Nights, Meditations & Memoranda for a Passing Smile is forthcoming in 2024. He is the editor of We Still Use Poetry: The 2nd Quarterly Anthology of Contemporary Poetry in the Margins.

Review :
Világos is an acute and brilliant poet, writing on being done wrong by the fiction of time and the system of the city. His is the poetry of the city that looks out into the night, time's winged sparrow, and notes the sky, knowing that there are few takers, but wanting the praise anyway. It is a manifesto for the protest poetry of the future, a classic in the tradition of Allen Ginsberg's Howl. - Lizzie Violin, Lost Form Murders Even in its war, or rather war of rhetoric and art, it creates room for the imagination, for the bodily act of constructing meaning. Világos has given us a collection of the temporal equivalent of large-scale physical protests, full of auspicia mundi and humus hile signs. 'We shall be citizens of the real, we shall not die in vain.' In the chaos of rebellion, new things will be born and the old, the patterned, will be left to die. - Nicolette Grenadine, Sunday This book is not only monumental, but also endlessly entertaining. It is organized by theme, and within each theme, not always by characters, but by subjects. The process of building these themes has been so complex and strange that it seems as though the true theme of the book is what Világos himself has called 'the graphic process'. - Ricky Cole, How to Die in Paris 'For what is time, but the river in which everything that could not be has to flow through?' These are the most arresting lines in Világos' work. They are not just elegantly weird; they are a phenomenological ontology of the formative, disjunctive period of one's life. At the centre of the book is an interrogation of time in flux; of arrival and departure, reflection and dispersion, dreams and text, planning and co-creation. These are shifts in the distance between past, present and future. They are recognisable reflections of the changing geography of life. It is often said that literature is ultimately about a search for home. Világos is, perhaps, our most interesting and definitive answer to that search. - Matthew Mitero, City of Geist Világos takes us through the problem of reference and out the other side. In an age of ultra high definition televisions which seem more real than real, literature remains a powerful technology to awaken us out of our stupifactions and stupid actions. The work here both critiques and expands radical publishing praxis into dimensions of prolific labour within the anonymity of the imaginary domain (Drucilla Cornell). By dwelling in alternative references, the power to shoot objects in the volatile field of cultural production is stimulated via simulation and the synthetic. Much of the future has been done and our job as readers is to recover its latent energy in the Now. - Ziddy Ibn Sharam, Acharenement The Lark Sings Windis a wonderful contribution to the literary landscape, nothing less than extraordinary, incredibly lyrical poetry that demands attention only to go on increasing in its tenderness, its cleverness, its interest and its deepness. - N. O. Lannorth, The Daily Telegram Writing as poetry that is novel in verse - Anna Grave-Simmons, Sunday Mag The Fashion Dog is a book that broods... rich in wit, in complex and interesting imagery...rarely less than deeply moving, but rarely more than superficially interesting. - Hamish McCay, Contemporary Review The Fashion Dog is the worst book I've ever read. It's so boring that if it were an animal I'd put it out of its misery. It's also so badly written I think you should just burn it. - Jen Wills, Slalom