Sunday, March 4, 2012

We Bury the Landscape by Kristine Ong Muslim

I am very excited to share this author and her work with you today, she emailed me the nicest email regarding my blog and I just had to pay her back in some way!  I think she is a dynamite new author and one that has a long and successful future...

Kristine is offering 3 copies if her book, We Bury the Landscape on Goodreads...go enter!

About the Author:

Kristine Ong Muslim is the author of the forthcoming flash fiction collection We Bury the Landscape (Queen's Ferry Press), the poetry collection Grim Series (Popcorn Press), and several chapbooks, most recently Insomnia (Medulla Publishing). Her short fiction and poetry appeared in over 500 literary and mainstream publications. Her work received Honorable Mentions in Year's Best Fantasy and Horror and garnered multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Web 2011, and the Science Fiction Poetry Association's Dwarf Stars Award and Rhysling Award. Her stories and poems were published in the likes of Boston Review, Narrative Magazine, Southword, Sou'wester, The Pedestal Magazine, and hundreds of genre venues, from Abyss & Apex to One Buck Horror.

Visit Kristine at her website HERE
Follow Kristine on Twitter HERE
Kristine's Amazon Page HERE
Become a fan on Goodreads

About the Book:

We Bury the Landscape
Queen's Ferry Press, April 2012, USA
cover art by Siobhan McCusker, edited by Erin McKnight
168 pages,  5.25 (w) x 8.00 (h) x 0.38 (d)
ISBN 978-0-9839071-4-5  


We Bury the Landscape is an exhibition of literary art. Ekphrasis, collected. One hundred flash fictions and prose poems presented to view. From the visual to the textual, transmuting before the gallery-goer’s gaze, the shifting contours of curator Kristine Ong Muslim’s surreal panorama delineate the unconventional, the unexpected, and the unnatural. Traversing this visionary vista’s panoply of “rooms of unfinished lives,” the reader unearths and examines and reanimates—revealing the transcendent uncanniness that subsists underfoot.

What Reviewers Are Saying:

(From Goodreads by The Joy of Booking)

This is such an unusual book! Is it fiction? Sometimes. Is it non-fiction? Maybe a little. Is it poetry? Definitely. Is it also prose? For sure.

Essentially, Kristine Ong Muslim has given voice to the thoughts that traipse through your mind when looking at art. While sometimes her words are literal interpretations of the visual, more often they tell a story of what is lurking just outside the frame. From heartbreaking backstory to inspiring monologue, these vignettes delight and give each piece new dimension.

I am not terribly well versed in art, and I admit to reading the book sitting at my computer so as to look up each piece before I read the accompanying story. This made the reading take much longer than it otherwise would have, but I think it was the right way to do it. It became almost a meditation - find the artwork, study it, read the piece, study the artwork again, frequently re-read the piece and re-study the art - sometimes I'd spend 15 minutes or more on an individual story of only a few sentences. In each case, I was rewarded. I was also introduced me to new artists I'd never heard of, like Julie Heffernan, whose work I am now a little obsessed with. I'm also looking forward to my next trip to a museum or gallery, so that I can try my hand at this new way of viewing art.

 

2 comments:

  1. Love The Joy of Booking's review, this seems exactly the way I am going to read Kristine's book - looking forward to checking out the artwork and learning some things :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi, great post on Kristine's book.

    I'd like to point out that the link to her book on Queen's Ferry Press is invalid. It has an extra [ at the end of it.

    ReplyDelete