Charles Borkhuis
After Image
$16
ISBN 0-925904-60-0, 90 pages

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