Cosmic Horror by James Knight
Over the last four years, James Knight has drawn on the grammar of genre to revitalise contemporary surrealism. Cosmic Horror may be the most realised of this project to date.
A pamphet-length collection of damaged memories and waking nightmares, the narrator finds language becoming as alien as their body. This writing is as unsettling as it is inventive.
198 x 129 mm / 42 pages with colour images / ISBN: 978-1-7391580-1-9
Praise for Cosmic Horror:
A primordial futurism in which no where or when survives beyond its utterance, James Knight’s poetry disembodies itself in the bodily convulsion between animal and digital: impossible and visceral, this ‘wounded cinema’ of language is the ‘nothing poem’ that contains it all.
Invoking the universe between dog and wolf in a surrealist howl of dazzling and violent transformation – a sci-fi anti-hymn to the empty everything – Cosmic Horror is a deeply powerful and startling intervention in/of contemporarySurrealism. Unashamedly out-of-time so as to be the timelessly looping simultaneity of any time, these exquisite splinters become clouds of granular living that catch in the throat until the correct word for breathing chokes.
Maybe it exists through the puzzling and successive realities of Alain Robbe-Grillet, splicing the graphic novels of Max Ernst into an alien gothic of scrambled equations and Lovecraftian tentacles; maybe it stirs in the asemic womb, reenvisaging J. G. Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition as a glitch-art gallery populated by A.I. reinterpretations of Francis Bacon, each Eisenstein scream stewing in the entrails of Artaud’s ghost which is, naturally, now stored in code and freely downloadable in the sounds of gastric static; maybe it never existed, trembling out its rumour in the stories and cardiogramscrawls of Henri Michaux, (dis)located between ‘friend’ and ‘monster’ and asking of you, to screen it as you screen it out – the light that is dark.
Knight is one of the very few modern poets able to hold séance with the frayed nerves of Surrealism and spark them into the digital anxieties of now. I recommend you read this and then go back, as if returning to a game you don’t remember beginning, and read it again. Soon you will be ready to go further back, twitching back the hands of the ‘red clock’, into all of his uniquely troubling publications. Unlike anything else in UK poetry, Knight’s aberrant negotiations and negations of voice will keep evolving – daring us to catch up.
- David Spittle