Terrel Hale

Saints and Latin Decadence Terrel Hale

What follows is not a story. It is descriptions of instinct and desire, of the secular and holy. It is, in a way, what I see the purpose of art being. This is a novel that doesn't behave. It does not participate in good manners. Samuel Beckett said that the task of the artist is to find a form to accommodate the mess. This novel trusts the reader to do the work of narrating connections and stretches the assumptions about what texts are. I disrupt old narratives not because I have no faith in narratives, but because I mean for the reader to see in my gaps and verbal impasses the opening for new narratives. I have aided the metamorphosis from narrative into non-narrative by experimenting with typography. This is a book that has to be turned over and side-ways, in order that it be read both as pictures and text. This is a novel existing in the space of poetry creating an effect that adorns the action where the effect is more than the action. It is prose written with the intensity of poetry, a prose poem or something in between with more extended meditation in the same tradition of Edgar Allen Poe's Eureka or Baudelaire's Prose Poems or Bernadette Mayer's extended studies where the sentences keep accruing. Here there is no epiphany at any moment or no epiphany at all and because of this, this work is intentionally disorienting and disconcerting. One of my intentions was to be as close to nature as possible. Working outdoors was my inspiration and the primary object of my study. My aim was to respond...to the scene before me, to avoid conventional ways of seeing, and to fill my work with a sense of open air rather than studied light.