Communicatingroups

• Communicatingroups
• Price: $16.00
• Stu Watson
• Poetry, Illustrated
• 96 pages | PB
• ISBN 978-1-7334920-0-3
• LCCN 2020930569
• March 15, 2020

REVIEWS

Los Angeles Review of Books (Interview)

ABOUT

Combining elements of documentary, history, and autobiography, Communicatingroups is author Stu Watson’s reckoning with our societal obsessions with celebrity and violence. Tracking the Hobbesian affiliation between monarchy and physical domination, Communicatingroups takes a broad view of human culture, skipping across the centuries from the death of Julius Caesar to contemporary instances of mass violence, seeking to draw divergent horrors into a new relation. Illustrated by the author’s own linocut prints and employing a variety of conceptual and formal modes, Communicatingroups unflinchingly confronts personal and cultural histories, searching out new forms of organization from the ruins of a broken world.

PRAISE

“Stu Watson gives us an Esthétique du mal for our very evil time, horror and delight in both strictest measure and disarmingly clear prose. Anyone wondering where to find the contemporary poetic inheritance of Poe and Baudelaire, upgraded through the sensibility of Ashbery and the language poets, need look no further than these pages.”
—Marco Roth, author of The Scientists, founding editor, n+1

“In his ruminations on fame, violence, family, death, and aspiration, Stu Watson’s deployment of some of history’s best-known figures lends this book an essayistic plausibility that resonates now. Against all odds, the verve of his poetic style summons new suspense to Watson’s embellishments on well-known tales. Communicatingroups builds a weird romance with a spine-tingling fascination all its own.”
—Chris Hosea, author of Put Your Hands In and Double Zero, winner of the Walt Whitman Award