And did I mention the dragon? Reb Livingston's new novel is completely unique and utterly satisfying. 'I hope the world after the apocalypse looks a lot like BOMBYONDER: deliciously fragmented, breathtakingly poetic, and hellishly funny. We should all eat bombs and hack into our own Hera journeys.'-Kim Gek Lin Short Livingston's unnamed protagonist-call her Psyche, Cogito, Dingbat, or even Carry-is endearing in her absurd quest for self-improvement. The prose products that singe this portrait of the psyche burning are tooled like circuitry on a dysfunctional motherboard. 'Bomb-pills, birthed birds, and the scorched Jacob's Ladder of a story- stoked neural brinkdom-BOMBYONDER is a gestalt of grim and Grimm. Honestly, I do not know how she survived the writing of it.'-Lindsay Hill Livingston has delivered a fabulous, mind bending book.

BOMBYONDER transcends any sense of 'experimentation,' and occupies, essentially, its own genre. Through the marvel of her language, the book becomes a shimmering whole a miracle met like the first mirror. Livingston devises a pulsing, haywire logic that somehow rivets the parts to each other and the reader to the page.

But BOMBYONDER is not merely a scathing, slicingly funny assemblage. Bombs, masks, machinery, birds buried at the bottoms of women, emerge and recede in the blistering landscape. ''Some kind of war happened at some time or another and continued for quite some time to come.' So begins BOMBYONDER, Reb Livingston's blistering, kaleidoscopic, post-bomb- blast shrapnel-storm of a book. The book, however, opens as legend-like so many myths, a passionate patricide leads to an impossible quest-and it is important to remember this classic grounding because as the story continues, it dives into sensuous, often outrageous obscurity.Fiction. Poet Reb Livingston's debut novel, appropriately titled Bombyonder, explores this confusing realm in lyrical prose that, while often overwhelming and disgusting, is searing and unforgettable.īombyonder is a disjointed tale made up of fragments: diary entries, memories, text messages, letters, forums from the future, and other indirect narrative forms. It is a subconscious space of both apocalyptic absurdity and astonishing lucidity, where zombie sex jokes can morph into profound commentaries on social media, and vague memories hilariously allude to Ancient Greek literary characters. It smells of decaying flesh, drips with bodily fluids, and brims with the anger of a Medusa. Not exactly a physical location, but more than a passing thought, Bombyonder echoes poetry of mythic proportions. Marie Curran reviews Bombyonder in The Collagist:īeyond logic and linear thinking, manners and order, humor and horror, there is Bombyonder.

Bombyonder by Reb Livingston