National Gallery

(Paperback)

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Description

Jonathan Balls fourth poetry book, the first in seven years, swirls chaos and confession together. At the books heart is a question: Why create art A series of poetic sequences torment themselves over this question, offering few answers and taking fewer prisoners. Loose sonnets that consider the artistic creations of Leatherface, monster-killer from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, sit alongside Rilkean elegies for an iPhone. Surreal meditations on the collage work of Guy Maddin are followed by all of the lines from Melvilles Moby-Dick that mention salt. Politicians and painters jostle while absurdist humour crashes into stark admissions of vulnerability in the wake of having children. A startling diversity of styles and subjects feed into the maelstrom of The National Gallery, and its dark currents will draw you in to drown.

Reviews

"I wish I were better at expressing the amazement and pleasure I experienced while reading The National Gallery, in which Jonathan Ball has installed a wondrous collection of the narcotic, gorgeous, and hilarious. With the pretext of institutional gravitas the poems are curated and situated with surprise in mind across the galleries of an imagined floor plan. Unlikely works with fantastic titles hang in grand halls and velvety salons, or hawk themselves in the gift shop. There is in situ poetry wafted out amid the onion-sizzling franchises of a museum food court, a venue that astonishes as much as Kafka's Nature Theater of Oklahoma. In these long dark corridors Ball's phrases often fold in on themselves suddenly to produce startling mouthfuls of dream and delight. Text winks at us from spurious trompe l'oeil canvases. The reader doesn't even notice the trapdoor that's opened beneath their giddy feet." -- Guy Maddin, director of My Winnipeg
"Ball deploys his distinctive blend of sinister insight and munificent imagination, illuminating horror and dark humour, artful precision and formal play." -- Daniel Scott Tysdal, author of The Mourners Book of Albums
"This is a brilliant and profound book, often hilarious and moving, alive and alert to our life, our language, our darkness, and our love." -- Gary Barwin, author of Yiddish for Pirates
"Brilliant and smothering. Ball sculpts a heartbreaking figure of an artist like and unlike the author, living quotidian life, out of the shifting material of the unconsciousness." -- Natalee Caple, author of In Calamitys Wake

Author Bio

Jonathan Ball is an award-winning author of dark, experimental artworks. He holds a PhD in creative writing and uses an analytical approach to show serious writers new ways to write, edit, and work so they can create innovative art that stands taller than the crowd. He is the author of numerous books, including Ex Machina (Book*hug), poetry about how machines have changed what it means to be human, Clockfire (Coach House Books), 77 plays that would be impossible to produce, The Politics of Knives (Coach House Books), poems about violence, narrative, and spectatorship, and winner of a Manitoba Book Award. Jonathan also published John Paizss Crime Wave (University of Toronto Press), an academic study of a neglected cult film classic, which was launched at the Toronto International Film Festival and also won a Manitoba Book Award. Jonathan has also directed short films, (including Spoony B, which sold to The Comedy Network), served as the managing editor of dANDelion magazine, and founded the literary journal Maelstrom. In 2014, Jonathan won the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer. He lives online at www.JonathanBall.com, where he writes about writing the wrong way.