The External Combustion Engine
Michael Ives
“Michael Ives’ cunningly quarried prose plinths are stippled with the comedy and cruelty of Marcel Duchamp’s and Raymond Roussel’s wildest inventions. Move over, machines célibataires—The External Combustion Engine has arrived, and it’s hummin’!”
—John Ashbery
“The motoric energy of Michael Ives’ inspections is what first caught me: not just the narrative energy but the urgency of breath and its deeper, darker sources. All systems were being used to inspect—to investigate. He notices and connects. The brilliance of music is around these texts of his, driving rich prose discourse through the narrow gate of song.”
—Robert Kelly
“These narratives are intensely, wildly logical, sensual, humorous, transgressive—catapults into the particulars of an exquisite knowledge for which you can’t know you are being prepared. The high-wire pleasures and exhilarations of reading are happily reawakened by this brilliant, surprising book.”
—Joan Retallack
“The prose in Michael Ives’ The External Combustion Engine is written to the dimensions of fable, with the compression of a well-crafted dream, fueled by fricative undulations of imagination and effect, enriched with more than the standard degree of vividness in particularly American linguistic superabundance which borders on the grotesque and adores each moment of it. It is pleasure.”
—Heather Ramsdell
About the Author
Michael Ives is a writer and musician living in the Hudson Valley. His work with the language/performance trio, F’loom, was featured on National Public Radio, on the CBC, and in the anthology of international sound poetry, Homo Sonorus. His poetry and prose has appeared in such magazines as Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Exquisite Corpse, New American Writing, and Sulfur. He teaches at Bard College.
Press and Reviews
Selected for AIGA 50 Books/50 Covers 2004 design competition
“Michael Ives’ cunningly quarried prose plinths are stippled with the comedy and cruelty of Marcel Duchamp’s and Raymond Roussel’s wildest inventions. Move over, machines célibataires—The External Combustion Engine has arrived, and it’s hummin’!”
—John Ashbery
“The motoric energy of Michael Ives’ inspections is what first caught me: not just the narrative energy but the urgency of breath and its deeper, darker sources. All systems were being used to inspect—to investigate. He notices and connects. The brilliance of music is around these texts of his, driving rich prose discourse through the narrow gate of song.”
—Robert Kelly
“These narratives are intensely, wildly logical, sensual, humorous, transgressive—catapults into the particulars of an exquisite knowledge for which you can’t know you are being prepared. The high-wire pleasures and exhilarations of reading are happily reawakened by this brilliant, surprising book.”
—Joan Retallack
“The prose in Michael Ives’ The External Combustion Engine is written to the dimensions of fable, with the compression of a well-crafted dream, fueled by fricative undulations of imagination and effect, enriched with more than the standard degree of vividness in particularly American linguistic superabundance which borders on the grotesque and adores each moment of it. It is pleasure.”
—Heather Ramsdell
About the Author
Michael Ives is a writer and musician living in the Hudson Valley. His work with the language/performance trio, F’loom, was featured on National Public Radio, on the CBC, and in the anthology of international sound poetry, Homo Sonorus. His poetry and prose has appeared in such magazines as Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Exquisite Corpse, New American Writing, and Sulfur. He teaches at Bard College.
Press and Reviews
Selected for AIGA 50 Books/50 Covers 2004 design competition
