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by
Donald Kuspit
Bruce Helander’s collages have that “high degree of immediate absurdity”—Breton’s phrase—that marks them as surreal. The method in the madness of surrealist art is what Breton called “pure psychic automatism,” “a condition in which activity is carried out without conscious knowledge.” This allows one to associate, more or less freely—playfully or compulsively, depending on how deeply unconscious one is—images that one is ordinarily conscious of to “extraordinary” effect, as though in a dream.
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Book Reviews
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by Miriam N. Kotzin
Hide Island, Richard Burgin's sixteenth book and eighth collection of stories, is a brilliant offering, outstanding even in the context of his previous work, which has earned a well-deserved reputation for masterful, darkly comic forays into contemporary angst and the human condition. Insightful and lucid, Hide Island is remarkable for being at once accessible and profound.
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by M.G. Piety
Not all the pieces in this collection are dark though. Some could easily have been penned by Bette Sans Souci. “Some First Thoughts,” and “The Language of Wildflowers” (an allusion to a Victorian work, The Language of Flowers, by Kate Greenaway, rather than to the novel by Vanessa Diffenbaugh) are both wonderfully light hearted, but also so clever that they avoid being trite.
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