Author Description

Marc Vincenz has achieved the virtuosic feat of rendering homage to The Waste Land while simultaneously engendering a love epic of nine hundred lines. Vincenz enters and plunders the minds of Alexandrian gnostics, Celtic Druids, medieval alchemists, magi if the Iranian Plateau, and tantric adepts of the Indus Valley. Meanwhile, Tom Bradley has annotated this book in the strange way he did Epigonesia and Felicia's Nose. He strip-mines the pseudepigrapha and snuffles into Mariolatry's odd pastel nooks, where the sense of smell prevails over all others. As a precaution, Bradley doesn't neglect to conjure the crone initiatrix of the Vama Marga who teaches prophets, seers and revelators to control their gag reflex. Gradually, something like a novel materializes among the endnotes. A strange figure emerges: Siegfried Tolliot, who, in 1958, shared intimacy with Ezra Pound at Saint Elizabeth's insane asylum in Washington, D. C. The result is that rarity of rarities: a new genre, situated in real time as the poet's bright lyricism contends with the cackling paranoia of his annotator. It all culminates in a 300-item bibliography and an index of 900 entries, citing everyone from Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa to Zosimos of Panopolis. Praise for This Wasted Land Nothing like it. A transcendence. Completely novel. Will be remembered forever. And that is an understatement. I didn't think giants still walked the earth. I know about comedy, wit, multiple allusions... but I didn't think anyone was still around who could do what Vincenz and Bradley did in This Wasted Land... delight after delight... —Joe Green, author of The Limerick Homer A palatial homage to Eliot; ludic cruise through Pound's errata. Ideally epic, This Wasted Land preens and pummels conceptual imagery into a sacred profane realization of feminine figure manifesting appearances in a spindle of eras. The letter leaves no wand unwaved, no veil unraised, no, the fearless love song curiously transfi