The Mannequins Are More Real Than You
I feel them tugging the strings
of my nerves
playing with my mechanisms
They make themselves at home in the lumber room of my skull
James Knight's latest collection of poems and prose poems takes the reader to the other side of the mirror, where the Bird King reigns and mannequins are more real than people. More
- Category: Poetry » Contemporary Poetry
- Category: Fiction » Literature » Literary
- Published: March 31, 2016
- Words: 13,120
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9781310946981
The first book I ever loved was Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, a picture book that distils story-telling to its essence. Dreams and monsters have preoccupied me ever since.
Much of my writing appears first as tweets, which are then made into miniature poems or prose poems, or assembled into longer pieces. In March 2012 I was invited by cyberpunk novelist Jeff Noon to join his Twitter writing group, @echovirus12, a project that has led to many interesting collaborations, for example with the artist Diana Probst, who provided illustrations for two of my books, The Madness of the Bird King and 13. In May 2014 I set up Chimera, an online group of writers and artists whose Twitter bio sums up my attitude to creativity:
"Children make pictures, poems and stories playfully, adventurously, unconstrained by considerations of realism, theory or convention. So do we."
Pictures are very important to me. As children we are encouraged to make connections between stories and illustrations, to enjoy the way they illuminate each other. But then we reach adulthood and, in most books of fiction and poetry, that pleasure is denied us. All of my books contain pictures, by me or my collaborators; there is a lot of fun to be had by the reader in exploring the connections and disjunctions between word and image.
You can see my latest work at www.thebirdking.com.
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Reviews of The Mannequins Are More Real Than You by James Knight
Fantastic material!
I even bought the paperback to take with me. Sometimes reading on the smartphone just isn't good enough.
I picked this up a couple of days ago. It truly is a mixed media (style) of writing. The author has managed to weave together different (sometimes radically) ideas into what is a cohesive story. In some ways, the book itself defies description. However, I can whole heartily recommend this to anyone who understands that a straight narrative is somewhat banal.
(review of free book)