Surrealia by Miguel O. Mitchell. Gnashing Teeth Publishing 2024, 60 pages, $12.50, trade pb, 979-8-9898345-0-1, https://gnashingteethpublishing.com/books/surrealia/.
A Review by Herb Kauderer
Surrealia is hard to capture in under a thousand words. The book could easily be a novel or several movies. With its title the book establishes itself as an unreliable setting. The planet Surrealia is a strange mix of fantasy with reality, as the first poem demonstrates:
the first ten days outside I raged with fever
nurse phantoms attended me
a misty form shoved a hand in my mouth
-1
Some of the inherent powers of the place are introduced early as well:
i don’t sleep here
dreams tend to manifest
-3
Some of the fun is the way the surrealities are explained with mixes of science and fantasy.
he felt small here
i said that’s just reality
his reply
derogatory string theory
-4
This is a planet explored and perhaps settled by humans, but hosting many other creatures and sentients. For example there are flying range beings who, without wings, still leap off their mountains:
briefly falling from uncertainty
then buoyed up by diamagnetic miracles
repulsive love for free-willed water bags
selecting quantum states with abandon
-5
One of the fascinating things about the book is that it travels such a diversity of tone, style, and content, yet still gives the feeling of one continuous journey through a specific surreal world. There is a sense that this is a cousin to the Oz books, but written by a scientist and aimed at adults. In addition to the many alien races and creatures, there are also alien philosophies and physics. An example of adult views in Surrealia:
my brother who rejects our black ancestor’s torments
who thinks free market has meaning
but free will does not
-34
Freedom is one of the key sub-threads of the book, and a search shows twenty-three uses of “free”, but it is not just free will. In some sense, it is freedom from the bounds of reality, and perhaps the bounds of self. This is because it is later revealed that the planet is not just a place of alternative means of perceiving reality, but it is also connected to alternate realities.
By the end this is more important and dramatic than other things.
fear of more existential conflict led to the inter-hounds
dogs trapped between realities
their phantasmal noses sniffing out the variant
-56
Structurally, the book is presented in three sections. The unnamed first section is something of an introduction to the surrealism of it all. In that section the poems are numbered rather than titled. This is a place both, more realistic, and just as fantastical as other second worlds of the bizarre. Consider this first stanza of a haiku cycle:
puffy sentient clouds
graying green and ominous
hover and chortle
-6
Formal and open-form verses are mixed smoothly and add a parallel to the juxtaposition of fact and unreality. In the beginning, while the reader is learning to navigate Surrealia, who the narrator is, is not clear. At times it seems that Max speaks, sometimes an unnamed narrator, and at others, it seems to be Surrealia herself.
Between the explications of the fantastical there is the gritty relationship between Max and his physicist friend who leaves Surrealia to try to cash in on another world where the advanced aliens have died or left.
i ask
will we be any richer
when we have all the gold?
he sneers
one day you’ll understand
the value
of soulless
technocracy
-7
The physicist returns in the third section counterpointing poems exploring both the planet and Max’s contentious relationship with his brother Aaron. When Max returns to his homeworld for a time, he is greeted by Aaron
who lunges for my throat
his brotherly greeting
you’ve destroyed our legacy, he screams
-49
The second section is titled “The Museum Tour” and takes the reader on a tour of Surrealia’s Anharmonic Museum. Most poems are formatted with a title that starts with the word “Exhibit” or “Exhibits”. The few that are not formatted that way develop the theme of Max’s relationship with Aaron. The section serves to focus on the reality of human kinship in the midst of a world that makes no conventional sense.
The third section is titled “Max’s Journey” and covers his last days on Surrealia, his return to his home world, and then his return to Surrealia as a harbinger of the Church of the Crystal Spiders. In this part it becomes clear that somehow, Surrealia is addictive. In leaving, Max says:
i trudge toward the despised shuttle
my limbs heavy as blocks of ice
all feeling numbed by subzero reality
-45
The ending is a crescendo and so unexpected that it won’t be discussed here for fear of spoiling it. For this reader is raised gooseflesh. Pulling so many disparate threads together into such a powerful climactic scene is a tour de force.
Overall this book is a full creative universe that someone else might have turned into a thirty book series. In other words, readers should be prepared for a density of idea, creation, detail, and plot twists that may be disorienting in the best way. This is chewy, spicy, and transporting. The destination is partly up to you.
Herb Kauderer is an English professor at Hilbert College near Buffalo, NY. His poetry has appeared in hundreds of markets including the Dwarf Stars and Rhysling Anthologies. His most recent chapbook is Distilled from Water.
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