Author Description

To write is to ascend downward, as Hélène Cixous says, and it's this downward ascension that James Pate writes in Mineral Planet where "roots spread upwards / through ribcage and skies." Reading, then, becomes a kind of digging that's not an excavation so much as an attendance to what's left behind: sequins, wet depths, wallpaper, barbed wire, sunlight in ice. Transcendence becomes an unrelenting participation in what's fleeting: "Several all at once, and then none, ever again." Emmalea Russo, Author of Wave Archive and Confetti Costumes of feather and flesh, the hissing of angels - in this texture-drunk into the matter and mineral of life, James Pate perverts US literary culture's demand for narrativity, selfhood, order, with a poetry so gorgeously atmospheric even language itself becomes onyx. The saints of this baroque vision are artists - Iggy Pop, Fassbinder, St Teresa - because artists, especially artists who dare to go all the way, understand that gold is an ornament. It's worthless. Johannes Göransson, Author of The Sugar Book and Summer Like plunging one's entire head into a black mirror, Mineral Planet offers glimpses of a desolate future in which our legacy as human beings is merely a persistent afterimage burned onto the surface of reality. Mineral Planet reads as a leaky, spliced film created by a wistful collector: reader-viewers only witness glimpses and fragments of human landscapes and ruin, but each vision is lovingly curated. Visually saturated and highly sensory, Pate offers disarming Gothic pleasure in utter annihilation. M. Forajter, Author of Interrogating the Eye With its drifting, staccato decay, James Pate's Mineral Planet presents us with a litany of impersonal affects, strewn with the flourishing desiderata of an already-dead planet, manic in its transcendental decline. Eugene Thacker, Author of Infinite Resignation "Behind the nothing s