Ian McMillan Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“I can more or less remember when I first tried to be surrealistically creative: it was on a church youth club trip to London in around 1969 when I was 13. On the way home my mates and I were spectacularly bored on the rattling bus and I said, apropos of nothing, that when I got home I was going wash my hands in a bowl made from old leather cucumbers when I got home. That collision of leather and cucumbers got a laugh and a surreal door was opened in my mind.”
Sophie Herxheimer Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“Surrealism is just a way to cope with the extreme ordinariness and horror of daily life. If we don’t play, it’s like an acceptance of a world in which we eat and dress from a giant monotonous supermarket – we are at the mercy of the chains!”
The Book of Silence
Five object poems.
Dan Power Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“every night i lie in bed and lie and wait until my mind logs off … until my hardware powers down … i don’t know where i go at night or where i go during the day … i think this lack of knowledge is evident in my writing …”
Joe Sorren’s Between the Wrinkles
In the early 2000s, Joe Sorren emerged as an important figure in the eclectic and transversal artistic movement of Pop Surrealism, also known as Lowbrow art. These narrative paintings traverse the rooms of memory, unveiling in each work a hint of a story the artist holds closely within himself.
Out walking the fly, met girl with a flower
A selection of images from the Scottish Surrealist and collage artist John Dummet
Office Lens
These are abstract images partially inspired by visual distortions I sometimes experience while having a migraine. Except a bit more fleshed out. The other inspiration sources are deep ocean creatures and their otherworldly complexions.
Michael Chang Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“The surreal and the absurd are absolutely necessary. […] My work reflects my own thoughts and impressions about what makes people tick. Turns out I find comfort in the “not knowing”.”
Spring 2024 Book Launch!
We’re proud to present the next round of Mercurius books!
Mercurius’s Future World(s) is an anthology of essays that look beyond nihilistic neoliberalism.
Mercurius No. 2: Local Nature Devas is a selection of texts and images from the Poetry of Life, Society, Transitions, and Images sections of the website.
No unifying structure
As with the execution of an etching (drawing with a fine needle into a blackened wax ground), or with a poem (spontaneous first word/s, no need to understand), I begin my drawings on an impulse, not knowing or wanting to know the outcome, working spontaneously, attentive to detail - a process I have learnt to trust.
Sylee Gore Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“Inhale an image, exhale a word. Melt a book to paint a mirror. Buy nothing you can borrow. Refill a song. Place a window somewhere evident. Let muscle overcome memory. Is image a language never needing translation?”
Aaron Kent Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“Through surrealism, I write connected to activism, connected to absurdity, and connected to art.”
Yi Won Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“A central feature of Yi Won’s work is how she sees the world through images rather than meaning. "This feature makes me want to make my poetic language imagery newer and stranger," Yi Won says…"The irony of the closest thing being the most unfamiliar seems to provide an unfamiliar and familiar image at the same time.”
Jeff Hilson Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“My poems court the absurd in that they’re incongruous, at times silly, and frequently out of tune (from the Latin absurdus) – think The Residents’ Commercial Album, Heinrich Ignatz Franz von Biber’s scordatura tuning for the Rosary Sonatas, as well as The Shaggs…”
Maria Sledmere Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“My poetry is made from dream paste, shimmer artifice of momentary disturbance. I like that surrealism is about connection and rupture, copying, aporia. I always felt my soul was pretty alien.”
Chris Gutkind Surreal-Absurd
I feel my work is utterly real, in itself and what it refers to in myself or in the world outside myself, but to make it real I may use the unreal or strange or impossible, an old working truth of poetry and all art, that's always been one of its main practices, and a very effective one when done well, making us see and feel the world anew and more deeply than before, adding to the thickness and complexity of the real, and as many have said: art lies to tell the truth
Anne-Laure Coxam Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“Love is surreal, surreal is love” - to divert John Lennon’s line (big words! what’s love, what’s surreal?). These poems (what’s a poem?) emerged from an accident, the accident of opening a territory and the accident of venturing into this new intimate territory where two bodies touching and two subconscious minds clinking against each other is full of dangers and an endless surprise.
Kristin Bock Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“A successful surreal poem makes the magic happen inside the reader. Strangeness or dream logic can sneak past our rational sensors and scream through us like lightning.”
II
An excerpt from Michael Salu's work in progress novel “II”
william erickson Surreal-Absurd Sampler
Surreal-Absurd
“I like to say the same things over and over—but spelled different. Have you noticed?” Sharing the work & surreal-absurd outlook of PNW poet william erickson.
The never-ending quest…
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