Customer Reviews

Pagan Operetta

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I've had this book on my shelf ever since the Village Voice put Rux on the cover as one of their writers on the verge of shaking up the literary landscape. I just never got around to reading it and then lent it out and never got it back. Recently I ordered the second edition, distributed by Autonomedia.org and this time I READ it and I thought I was reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez...if I had known this book was this impressive, I would've read it the first time. Few young poets today have Rux's ability to create images as vibrant as he does. It's the stories in this book that impress me the most!

I love the short stories. The poetry is also really well written. It's not like anything I've read from any new writers. He's more experimental, but he's not inaccessible.

I was skeptical about this book warranting all the acclaim it has-- but now that I've read it, not since the beat generation have I read a book as innovative as this one. Rux isn't just one of these new jack on the mike types-- he's a real writer and this book proves it!

This book is so well written, I'm at a loss for words. He writes as if he were forty years older than he is. like he's been places and seen things in a million other lives. I forgot poetry was supposed to transport you places.

Carl Hancock Rux recently peformed "Pagan Operetta" at the Kitchen in New York City. His peformance, aided by soulful jazz vocalists and a world instrumentalist, was nothing short of breathtaking. Rux ripped through his emotionally charged modern adaptation of Sophacles' Oedipus with revealing intensity and commanding emotion, leaving a small audience mesmerized and yearning for more poetic prophecy from the young writer. The power of Pagan Operetta is its recital for a larger movement that, as universal as it is, still captures the socio-imaginative experience of the individual, whether it is Rux himself or the reader. This piece opens eyes not only to different shades and hues of the canvas we call experience, but to new colors altogether.