Absolute Away
Published on 16. April 2024
174 pages
978-1-938603-12-9 (ISBN)
Description
With Lance Olsen's signature flair, Absolute Away is an innovative narrative triptych, a story of one life reimagined. The first movement tells the story of Edie Metzger, a little Jewish girl who bit Hermann Göring's lip so hard it bled at a Nazi book-burning rally in 1933. In the second, in 1956, grown Edie is the passenger clinging to the backseat of the Oldsmobile 88 convertible driven by Jackson Pollock, moments before it plunges off the road. In the third, the narrative embarks into an ever-unspooling universe of Edies that might have lived?Edie's gender, past, and consciousness flying forever farther apart.
Absolute Away is a novel about travel in its largest sense?about the self, the past, the future, aging, ideas, relationships, our own mortal being(s) as transitive verbs, and how what and who we are connects to everything else.
More details
Person
LANCE OLSEN is author of more than 25 books of and about innovative writing, including, most recently, the novels My Red Heaven (Dzanc, 2020) and Dreamlives of Debris (Dzanc, 2017). His short stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals and anthologies, such as Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, Fiction International, Village Voice, BOMB, McSweeney's, and Best American Non-Required Reading.
A Guggenheim, Berlin Prize, D.A.A.D. Artist-in-Berlin Residency,
two-time N.E.A. Fellowship, and Pushcart Prize recipient, as well as a
Fulbright Scholar, he teaches experimental narrative theory and practice
at the University of Utah
Content
- Intro
- Absolute Away
- Publishing Details
- Dedication
- I
- This Night, This May
- Edie in Amber
- Written on Air
- The Law of Truly Large Hope
- An Unburned Rose
- A Commotion of Red Balloons
- Blueprint of the Ordinary World
- The Imperfect as Paradise
- A List of Insufficient Knowledge on a Cold Night
- Earth Tendencies
- The Sea You Can't See
- Distribution of Amazement
- Study in Magic
- All Those Pretty Flames
- Elevation as Optimism : 1
- Words as Weather
- Edie Metzger's Marvelousness Acknowledged
- The Cockroach Game
- Elevation as Optimism : 2
- Fire From Heaven as Anvil Lightning
- Global Positioning : 1
- These Smells
- These Sounds
- Global Positioning : 2
- Derivation of Butchers
- What Reading Feels Like
- Man in the Brown Macintosh
- Logic of Nightfall
- Ship of Theseus
- History as Forceps : 1
- Fabian : the Story of a Moralist
- Voice At the End of the Mind
- I Am What is Around Me
- A Garden Full of Flowers
- Hypersurface of the Present
- After the Final Yes
- Secret Life of Wardrobes
- Felis Catus
- The Dead Make a Noise Like Wings
- History as Forceps : 2
- The Amen Protocol
- Not Just the Hand, But the Arm
- Shut Out of Your Own Life
- Secret Life of Soundwaves
- The Ingrid, the Hans
- Written on Yearning
- Night Gives More Than it Takes
- Truth Depends on a Walk Around the Lake
- Children Picking Up Their Own Bones Game
- To Be Small And Shine
- Sky is Everywhere Like Holy Water
- Opulent Portals of Golden Sunlight
- Someone Somewhere is Traveling Furiously Toward You
- How the World Collects Inside You
- Shrapnel Beings
- Memory as Wind
- How Feats Bestow Colors
- Descent as Despair
- Why We Are Unmoved By Artificial Flowers
- Weather as Forgetfulness
- What Fairytales Taste Like
- Skin Hovel
- The Law of Bubbles
- Glass Mountain
- Persistence of Ashes
- Purity as Scent
- Wolf Dreams (1)
- This Grammar of Negation
- Wolf Dreams (2)
- How Perspective Arises
- No Escaping Gravity
- Every You, Every Me
- Song To Say Goodbye
- At the End of the Age of Wonder
- City of Luminous Fog
- the Melting Faith Game
- The Museum of Interruptions
- Derivation of Inconsistency
- Berlin, 2:12:07 A.M.
- Berlin, 2:12:08 A.M.
- Valley of the Unraveling
- How the Philosopher Proves the Philosopher Exists (1)
- How the Philosopher Proves the Philosopher Exists (2)
- World Arranging Itself Into Poem
- A Human Being Taking the Shape of His Container
- House of Light
- The Bewilderment of Living
- Dump Tackle
- Miscarriage as Footwear
- The Dentistry of Abuse
- How To Read With Your Nerves
- What Do Alleys Contain?
- All Tomorrow's Parties
- Altered Carbon, Altered Hydrogen
- II
- III
- The Future is Always Yesterday
- Ghost Mapping
- Season of Miracles
- Survival as Birdsong
- Signal Noise
- Travel as Anti-Teleologal Activity
- Travel as Contagion
- Jackie/Jacques
- The Failure To Levitate
- Drift, Arrival, Catastrophe
- Active Alerts
- The Infinite Canon
- What To Say To Everybody, Everywhere
- Travel as Winter Doubt
- Dispatches From the Drift
- The Great Silence
- Travel as Aging
- Travel as Reading
- Fable of Stillness & Flight
- The Great Chatter
- Dispatches From the Drift
- Travel as Drowning
- Dispatches From the Drift
- The Physics of Apparition
- Theory as Migration
- Prophecy of the Acid Dark
- Reality is Not What it is
- After the Final No Comes a Yes
- The Most Beautiful Question
- The Conversion of Sorrow
- The Conversion of Edda
- This Waste of Skin
- Travel as History
- The Pursuit of Total Mortality
- Innocence, Sin, Redemption, Repeat
- The Art of Subtraction
- Electrical Systems as Voyage Devices
- Dispersal Truancy
- ReLethe
- The Great Slur
- Sound Poem of Defeat
- Dispatches From the Drift
- The Great Fluctuation
- Desperation Nation
- Dispatches From the Drift
- The Incorporation of Felicity
- Travel as Metempsychosis Apparatus
- Travel as Family
- This Futility of Connective Tissue
- Duration as Botch
- The Pneumatics of Scale
- Travel as a Saturday Afternoon
- A Friday Daybreak
- A Thursday Nocturne
- A Wednesday Sooner Or Later
- A Tuesday At 3:00 A.M.
- A Monday Eventide
- A Sunday Morning
- The Limbic System
- Zone of Avoidance
- Geography of Monosyllables
- Occupying Lacunae
- This Queen of Nightmares
- Coherence in the Time of Timelessness
- Air At Sunrise Has No Knowledge
- Ellipsis as the Perfection of Thought
- The Encyclopedic Flaying Game
- Acknowledgments
- About the Press
