Description
Winner of the 2011 Omnidawn Chapbook Poetry Prize
Banishing poets from the well-ordered city did not prevent the creation of fictions: SHAM CITY is the capitol of fictitious capital, a no place of evaporating value where things sue for “damages resulting from sundown” and where “the night is good for it,” able to pay us back. “I began to sweat amid the cheering,” Harrison writes, maybe because, in a country where an entire village drowns “in the sweet contents / of its privatized wells,” it’s hard work to keep it real. And beautiful work. And weird.
Ben Lerner, Judge of the 2011 Omnidawn Chapbook Prize
About the Author
Reviews
Excerpt
Evan Harrison lives in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He graduated in 2011 from The Center for Writers at The University of Southern Mississippi.
blockquote>Sham City is a metropolis of backwards, upside-down and inside-out architecture and society. M. C. Escher would be perfectly at home living there. Funny and fierce, there is nothing false in Harrison’s vision.
Sham City
This tree is really something in a row with other trees the space
between each roughly equal. Runny boulevards. The business park
is a labeled organ and each pest is a scalpel. Elswhere fluids suck
bedness from the walkways cloud-gists pump across the Quik Stop
window. Where to go. What is cheap. A lit-up spoon and bowl
emporium retrofitted with cracking chairs from the weedy railside.
The screen secondarily serving as mirror removes typical revulsion.
Jams of paper and traffic and blood and raspberries. The man basks
on a dusty wave prepared to lose it.
