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Cart![Autobiography of the [Undead]](/product/productimage/9781940853406.jpg)
Autobiography of the [Undead]
Paperback
ISBN13: 9781940853406
Publisher: Calamari Press
Published: Jan 15 2025
Pages: 152
Weight: 0.48
Height: 0.35 Width: 6.14 Depth: 8.25
Language: English
Autobiography of the [Undead] is an autobiographical mosaic, a memoir reconstructed from a mirrored myriad of textual fragments from other books, movies, songs, articles, web pages, inner thoughts, personal conversations/correspondence, etc. all parsed and deconstructed, then reformulated and collaged in a new light. For has not every sentence already been said? How vital is context and subtext, the framed phrasing coming before and after? Does Marguerite Duras own the four words I want to write? Can no one else besides Ocean Vuong write, I want to make my words deliberate? Anyone can play three chords or a sequence of tones, but what about the rhythm, tempo, key, timbre, dynamics, harmonics or accent? Or the instrument the notes are played on, the natural-born tone of voice?
With thoughtful reverence, Emilio Carrero appropriates and reshapes these fragments of sea glass and twists and spins them into a collaged kaleidoscope unique to his own sad, brown Puerto Rican life. Does he not have the right to sing along with Gillian Welch when she croons, I want to do right, but not right now? In Before Midnight, when Ethan Hawke says, that is a good line, I want to use that in a book someday, are the screenwriters the only ones that can take such lines and reuse them in books? Is not every book an ever-morphing Ship of Theseus, riding on the shoulders of those that came before us?
With the dexterity of a surgeon stitching together a new Frankenstein from hundreds (704, in fact) of others, dead and undead (for, as Carrero writes (quoting Marquis Bey), once the work is out of their hands, the author dies a little death), the author compiles this cacophony of sound bytes into a holographic chorus of voices, a quantum superposition of tethered threads woven into a textured tapestry that blurs the boundaries of fiction/nonfiction, appropriation, authorship and literary license, reviving the words into a new life form all it's own.
This is an autobiography from/in/as [the graveyard], and it will unsettle you. As we all need to be, for such an unsettling brings us to each other; it brings us to the graveyard-who knew it was so, so full of (our) love, of our yearnings. We can live there, in the graveyard, in a non-possessive undead coalition. Emilio Carrero gives us an exquisite meditation on gritty love, honest togetherness, and a forceful consideration of what it means to live with, for, and as the [un]dead.-Marquis Bey
Maybe the only part of a life that can be written honestly is the crisis. Fearlessly grounded in the aspirations and cringe of a single life, Autobiography of the [Undead] nevertheless burns through the narrative and ontological expectations of both living and writing. Carrero lights a citational fever through a vast archive of texts, voices, and moments, and, like Clarice Lispector, creates a fleeting flame that lets us see an eternal presence. As long as we live, the crisis is us.-Farid Matuk
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