Catch The Tales Generated By Jessica Bozek Expressed As Print

me, it was just, . . inaccessible. This is kind of like two for me, I just didnt get it, "I'm leaving messages on the undersides of leaves, so that when the others come up out of the ground, they'll know what to do, " Effective and surreal, Jessica Bozek's collection conveys both the irony and the urgency of our prepostapocalyptic mentality via a fictitious catastrophe and its repercussions, Too deep for me, I guess, Good thing it was short!

PREFACE
Once upon a recent time, a very powerful nation attempted to destroy another nation via a military mission deceptively named Operation Sleep.
The very powerful nation succeeded, but for a single inexplicable survivor, known to those unmarked as the Lone Survivor, This book includes his story and many versions of what may or may not be the same story,

Oof, this was my everything, I randomly picked up this short collection of prose poems, because it was in the staff recommendation aisle at the Harvard Bookstore and the description/recommendation immediately caught my eye.
The format/structure is like an abbreviated Canterbury Tales, each tiny chapter narrated by a different POV, Its all about the muted horrors of war revisionism history being written by the victors survival after disaster finding meaning in the ashes unreliable narrators, Its a weird, dreamlike dystopian setting with the occasional fairytaleesque interlude, and where the cataclysm is caused by weaponised language itself Operation Sleep reads almost like the Pied Piper.


There are some valuable notes at the end too, providing some further details on Bozeks inspirations, incl, Ojibwe storytelling and the Iraq War and the/memorial,

This can be read in a single halfhour sitting, but I already kind of suspect Im going to reread it in future and just dip back into the well, because its themes amp images are so far up my alley.
.stars, rounded up because although its not perfect I honestly kinda wish it were longer, and just had more, and more impact its just filled with so many things that I love.
In truth, this is simply not the book for me, I had bought it thinking it a very slim volume of fiction and then was pleasantly surprised that it was a collection of poems, organized narratively, around an apocalypse event.
Fantastic! And while there are some

really thoughtful lines, and the narrative, as it stretches on, engages and challenges and provokes, for me, I prefer my poetry to feel more like a punch to the gut, short and swift and absolutely breathtaking, and my fictional narratives to make metaphor an engagement from chapter to chapter or poem to poem, and neither are what this book is about.


It is something that didn't hit for me that I could nevertheless appreciate and enjoy, Poetry. Stitching together a postapocalyptic history from the scraps of fairy tales, war memorials, hunting songs, and disparate scholarship, Jessica Bozek's THE TALES traces the violence that humans inflict upon one another.
As the central narrative of the Lone Survivor becomes revealed through the mouths of various perspectives, Bozek investigates the language that victims and perpetrators alike use to make sense of and attempt to forget the aftermath of violence.
From ordinary objectsfamily photographs, sweaters that unravel, old batteries, and lightbulbsto the remnants of destroyed art and architecture, an annihilated nation is brought into reality, and the Lone Survivor's story is simultaneously documented and invalidated, becoming "a memorial that will disintegrate over time, gray and fray as most of the dead did not have a chance to.
".