Sarah Burgoyne Libri

Camus's Meursault and Thelma and Louise meet up under the blazing sun. Obsessed with both Camus's L'étranger and Thelma and Louise, Because the Sun considers violence under the blazing sun. Starting with Meursault's murder of a man on the beach as he is "pressed" by the blinding sun and considering the gendered violence against the victim's sister, Sarah Burgoyne goes on to consider Louise pulling the trigger on Thelma's assailant -- all while thinking about the sun, that "unremarkable star" that is a material symbol of pain, an effective backlog we're slung under, pushing through desert after desert. Because the Sun's pastiche of personal and "objective" (often scientific) voices strives to embody both stylistic and formal "relentlessness" by teasing out discursive tonalities that blend and merge into each other, generating a blinding effect, like looking into the sun.

Using the numerical structure of pi (3.1415), Mechanophilia is a collaborative epic poem by the American poet Vi Khi Nao and Canadian poet Sarah Burgoyne that follows the omniscient voluble conversations and complaints of ad hoc biblical characters as they attempt to make sense of themselves on an ordered, disordered planet. Nao and Burgoyne, who have never met, began this project after discovering a mutual love of math and unending collaborations. This book, the first of four volumes presently completed, represents the first 1,000 digits of pi. Anachronistic in proportion, this work attempts to queer and rewrite myths in precise, restrictive numerical pi chronology, yet its verses remain free and ludic, time-travelling at will and often looping in present-day figures (Elon Musk, Lady Gaga, Cai Guo-Qiang, Phoebe Philo, Virgil Abloh, Donald Trump) and concerns. Feministic, irreverent, and supremely loquacious, Mechanophilia presents infinity as something reachable yet unrelated to linear time.

'I do not have a future, and I do not want dreams. My dreams are stories, written by a machine. And I will not think of her.' Luke Kierley has visited the writer and asked it to exorcise from him all memory of her. Now he has no idea who she was and he must try to find a way to live with a bleeding hole in his memory. Told in a unique voice that recalls southern gothic, classic horror, and frontier literature, Writer is like nothing you have read before. JM Burgoyne's debut brings her virtuosic voice alive in a striking and unforgettable meditation on free-will, love, and the lengths we'll go to avoid pain.