THE RESIGNATION
by Lonely Christopher
Lonely Christopher explores questions of identity, ethics, and power through the machinations of textuality in this bold new collection that updates formalist and conceptual practices to provide a searing, comical, provocative, and ultimately humanist critique of how we use and abuse language to form and enforce culture. Christopher presents bizarre and perverse takes on political rhetoric, Freudian psychoanalysis, religious texts, sexuality, English grammar, opera, children’s television, figurativism, epistles, modernist architecture, and more, purposing beguiling processes to take lusty stabs at entrenched forms of representation.
The Resignation meditates on the relation between fraught multitudes. There are sonnets, sexy lakes, sestinas, psychoanalysis, realistic nightgowns, Bert & Ernie’s slutty leather gear, the childhood fantasy of the mother-vulture, and Puritan speech. Magnetic fields of explanation nervously masturbate in a public portal of joyously reappropriated repression. How do you know this is for real? Because there is power and vast broken light. Nothing but pleasure. And this clear place within care. — Rachel Zolf
Lonely Christopher unflinchingly delivers deadly truths. His work stands at the tragicomic limits of contemporary queer writing, without giving in to the demand for a ubiquitous sign or logo. In the spirit of Artaud, he refuses to give up the poethical task of mourning and negation, jumping off the bridge without ceasing to write on his way down. For Christopher, the “blood world” of queer despair holds a concealed possibility for new forms of trust and awareness, making for a book as insightful as it is raw. — Felix Bernstein
Lonely Christopher is the author of the short story collection The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse (Akashic Books), the poetry collection Death & Disaster Series (Monk Books), and the novel THERE (Kristriania). His plays have been presented in Canada, China, and the United States. His film credits include several international shorts and the feature MOM, which he wrote and directed. He lives in Brooklyn.