The Man Suit

When I went to the Small Press Night put together by the folks at Quick Fiction earlier this week, I stopped by the table for Black Ocean. They had lots of cool stuff, but I decided to pick up The Man Suit by Zachary Schomburg, who edits Octopus. I was hipped to Octopus by my prof Peter Shippy. Geez, that's a lot of links.

I loved The Man Suit most for being its own crazy world. I also dug how one poem seemed to write another. The recurring characters and themes and images made me believe in the world between the covers. Instead of it being like reading Alice in Wonderland, it was more like being in Wonderland. Oh, and it has an index, which was fun to read for its own sake.

It makes you want to spend time with it - not to figure it out, but to explore it. In that spirit, I'm not going to quote it. Instead I have gathered everything I know about two recurring characters and tried to reconstruct the truth they came out of. If you like this, you should read the book because it made me want tease this out:

Marlene was known to dress inappropriately and inhabit hollowed-out trees, where she would hide agendas and hand out flowers. Other times she wore a purple one-piece bathing suit. Lost Souls would gather at the beach near her and write messages in the sand.

On occasion she told people her name was Madeline. She was made out of snow and knew just how to stand with her perfect feet and legs. She had once lived in a House of Glass, but somebody lost her at the planetarium.

Carlos Carlos was muscular, wore tuxedos and wrote operas. He owned a villa in Mexico that had a white phone. People call him on it even though he is dead. He also had a man suit and was sometimes chased by tree machines. One time he found a voice box inside a dead sheep. He claimed it told secrets.

His Garden of Lost Souls that got uprooted and all the lost souls floated loose. He floated into Canada on a life raft that he spent so long on he grew a full beard. After a brush with half-death, he noticed how heavy the sky in Canada was. He didn't like it when people asked him how he got there, even after some years. He ended up becoming scenery.