There’s a picture on every second page. A picture of a cell. A picture of a pig. A picture of some aspirins. Mickey Mouse, lips, a brain, some nuns. Pictures where you’re not quite sure what you’re looking at. In between these pictures are some sentences. Usually just one sentence per page. In and of themselves, some of these sentences seem tired, cliched: “Multinationals control our food supply.” “This is about the end of the world as you know it.” “Talk radio is a CIA plot.” If you were to put all these sentences together into one paragraph, if you didn’t have the pictures and all the white space in between, this would be a pretty lame little piece of prose. But the way Burns sequences the sentences, the space he allows, leaves the reader with a terrible sense of foreboding. It’s not so much the sentences themselves here, rather the way the sentences get found, that makes this book such a success.
a work of marginalia (chapbook) / publisher: Black Dog Press / main creator: Cliff Burns / $7 + $1.50 postage / 1228-D Walker St., Regina, Saskatchewan, S4T 5N5