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Reviews
At the beginning
of Chris Marker's film "Sans Soleil," the narrator says,
". . . in the nineteenth century, mankind had come to terms
with space, and that the great question of the twentieth was the
coexistence of different notions of time." Like Marker's
film, Charles Borkhuis' book-length poem "Afterimage"
speaks brilliantly to that question in terms of the image/language
connection. A plain-spoken (though subtly metered) narrative threads
through a cinematic run of constantly reconfigured images, to
bind them in time, but loosely, leaving enough space for readers
to enter. Characters appear, but as "traces that self erase/or
are transformed into repeating voices"; sometimes we recognize
them, but it is characters from our own dreams that we are seeing.
Likewise the "story" seems familiar, but it is a story
from our dreams. One of the many strengths of "Afterimage"
is the way Borkhuis illuminates the personal, so that we suddenly
see its universality, and thus become like viewers in a darkened
theater, together and alone, drawn to strange but familiar objects
that flicker in and out of light.
- Sharon Mesmer
Charles Borkhuis is one of our most merciless
vivisectors of the logics of bodypower exchange. We're talking
forensics here, not schematology. Like Hieronymous Bosch and William
Burroughs before him, his art collapses cosmos onto mundus causing
"reality" beneath our feet to crack open. Demons and
angels (supersolid forms of evanescent knowledge) begin a wild
romp in the
a f t e r i m a g e of that collapse. The dystopic postmodern
city becomes at once funnier & more frightening. The Social
Psychology Research wing of Borkhuis Poeticworks has been especially
created to debrief each of us on our status as triple agents of
late capitalism. You have special clearance. But so does everybody
else. What the. Exactly. Add this book to your spy kit.
- Rodrigo Toscano
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