Chasing Black Rainbows

by Jeremy Reed

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0720609240
• ISBN13: 9780720609240
• Release Date: November 1995
• Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers
• Length: 184 Pages
• Weight: 0.77 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.6" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

passionate and absolutely superb

why don't more people know about jeremy reed? the more i read his fiction and his poetry the more i want. if you've never been fortunate enough to encounter his work before, this is the place to start. he creates a vivid (if not realistic or necessarily true to 'reality')artaud for his novel and shows a great deal of sympathy for his alienated suffering and painful bouts of total isolation and madness. the ending is particularly beautiful and awe inspiring, wherein artaud finally realizes the dream of all imaginative poets, writers and just creative people in general--an actual plunge into the world of the imagination. of course none of it is really realistic, but curiously enough i take reed very seriously. he is not a man filled with wishful thinking or a desire to spread his longing for poetic and artistic escapism, but a man with such a luminous and stunning inner vision that he can do nothing else than write beautiful and absolutely unforgettable works of the most intense aesthetic vitality and vividness. reed portrays artaud brilliantly as a warrior of the poetic imagination and an avowed enemy of a society that represses the surreal and the creative. "madness is the pejorative term that capitalism applies to vision", he says at one point. the critics, pretentious morons that they are, dismiss reed because they see him as too 'derivative'. if jeremy reed is derivative, i for my part can only hope that more modern writers and poets will follow his lead and become derivative, if it produces works of aesthetic genius like this one. anyone who enjoys surrealist poetry and literature (or 'anti literature' as they so aptly called it) or is interested in the history or relationships within the group, buy this book the next chance you get. and any lover of poetry, whether he or she tends toward classicism or modernism, will adore this book. a must. (also read "delirium", reed's subversive and powerful study of rimbaud and his years as an adolescent rebel and seer.)

Sanity, Sanity, Sanity

Often I wondered whether madness is just sanity not yet baptised in the virgin waterfalls of reason. Reading this book confirmed that belief. The unfathomable power of the Dionysian Hero who sacrifices his sanity and carries the burden of the entire "civilised" world to push the definition of whats "acceptable" and "sane" - that very quality shines out in the hallucinatory, rat-eating madness of Antonin Artuad. Our hero gives us hope and a dream - a dream of a better tomorrow. The book also confirmed some of my other beliefs such as the ones held by Aldous Huxley on the relationship of certain exhibit A chemical "drugs" and creativity. Apart from the fact that the entire book is like one long, beautiful poem and the poetic imagery that it arouses shoots up the spine and flashes in the brain, it challenges the hypocrisy of the society and erects crystal pyramids for the martyrs, who sacrificed their sanity back in th 60s. A "doors of perception" cleansing book!