Talking God's Radio Show [Paperback]

John High (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1, 2006

Soaked in night visions and pierced through by jagged memory, Talking God s Radio Show tells that peculiarly American story in which, as Faulkner once said, The past isn t forgotten, it isn t even the past. John High s Virginia backwaters call to mind the feral, hallucinogenic American landscapes of Cormac McCarthy s Child of God, as well as Faulkner s Sanctuary. His journey through their underworld of racial and sexual transgression sparks caustic, brain-searing consequences we discover, at the soul s black bottom, a resolute will to rise up and die, as if both actions were one in the same. This novel is an lyric ode to the heart s ineluctable damnation and redemption. Albert Mobilio

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

John High is the author of several books, including Ceremonies, Sometimes Survival, the lives of thomas-episodes and prayers, and The Sasha Poems: A Book of Fables. He is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including three Fulbrights, two National Endowments and poetry awards from the Witter Bynner Foundation, Arts International, and Arts Link. The publication in 1997 (excerpts from) The Sasha Poems met with extraordinary critical acclaim, here and abroad. He is the editor of Crossing Centuries: The New Russian Poetry (Talisman House). A founding editor of the Five Fingers Review, he has also co-translated books of the Russian poets Nina Iskrenko, Aleksei Parshchikov and Ivan Zhdanov.

Product Details

• Paperback: 324 pages
• Publisher: Spuyten Duyvil (December 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1933132442
• ISBN-13: 978-1933132440
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,651,651 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A poet's novel, July 19, 2009

By 

Bluephurba - See all my reviews

This review is from: Talking God's Radio Show (Paperback)

John High is a poet and it shows. His previous novel - The Desire Notebooks - was chosen by the Village Voice as one of the year's best novels (I think 1999). It was very, very dense.

Talking God's Radio Show is a much easier read. Written with a poet's sensitivity to image, it is a rich evocation of the South of the fifties or early sixties. Events in the narrative are recursive, history doubles back on itself, characters are echoed in the history of other characters. Images create identities and themselves become the power and the downfall of persons. Sex, violence and tragedy permeate the book as atmosphere - psychic humidity ' more than as depicted events, their power transmitted as rumor and anticipation.

The main characters struggle to find their way through a threatening world and the ambiguity of their own desires. The book's world is deviant - characters are black, white, half white & black; straight, gay, bi-sexual; friends to one another, and then enemies, and then friend. Identities are fluid, history a story constantly being told and modified in the telling, so uncertain.

The book is not bleak. There's always the hope and the plan, the promise of the train to New Orleans, the new lover, the music, the vitality of life itself. The novel sweats, tap dances in a hot Southern bar long after midnight, full of albino gangsters, a cross-dressing murderer, a beautiful singer on her way to the bottom and young men ' runaways from the state orphanage, looking for their way through and out.

Pick it up, take the ride.