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SONNETAILIA

by Marc Nasdor

Sonnetailia is an interlinked series of poems written in a form called the "sonnetail." It is the author’s questionable attempt at mass-producing a modified, appendaged sonnet that defeats even the appearance of unifying quantum mechanics, general relativity and blank verse. With Cassandra-like exasperation the author picks through humanity’s digestive tract in a colonoscopic romp through a cultural and political blast-zone, strewn with turns of tongues, turns of phrases, good turns and five-car pileups that navigate the worlds of ecstatic pluralism in a chaptered, contrapuntal polyphony.

“Is that noise in my head bothering you?” Have your earplugs handy. Within this book’s pages you’ll find blaring little beat boxes spitting out the flotsam and jetsam of our zombified existence, simulacra of sonnets ready to pick at your brain cells with their prosthetic appendages. Nasdor has concocted a phantasmagoria of a lobotomized society inhabited by everything from cannibalistic carnivalites, pedophobes, and cryptocrats to adjuncts in arms, freshmen undertakers, and pingpong tourists. Think schlock and Shklovsky, and pay heed to the author’s anarchist invitation to “enter your edifice by any portal you choose.”
- Mónica de la Torre

With Sonnetailia, Marc Nasdor explodes the idea of the sonnet with a caroming, caracoling infratexture of language that wriggles straight up the coccyx. But the acrobatic language is not just pure performance: it serves to constantly move the emotional content forward, creating moments where past and present freely interact and then “circle back home towards the tonsured tension-spot.” We read our own lives in these lines, with new pleasure.”
- Sharon Mesmer