A note on : I will show you the life of the mind... reviewed on Interpreter's House

https://theinterpretershouse.org/reviews-1/2021/2/17/joseph-turrent-reviews-sj-fowler

A generous review of my 2020 choose your own adventure poetry fiction hybrid book I WILL SHOW YOU THE LIFE OF THE MIND (ON PRESCRIPTION DRUGS) by Joseph Turrent. The book is available here https://poembrut.bigcartel.com/product/iwillshowyou

“Again, this leavening of darkness by the surgical insertion of an item from childhood. Humour in this text comes when you least expect it. You feel as if someone knows you truly, then they go and buy you a soda stream machine. You feel the sudden chill on the hand of a gaudy drink you didn’t realise you were holding. Is everything over now? Should you run like a deranged John Goodman down the burning corridors of your life? (I should say here that my wife bought me a soda stream last year as a gift. It was very welcome and I am very happy with it.)

Fowler foists uncertainty on us, and some of the most memorable passages of the book evoke the inescapable, unaccountable peril of an anxiety dream. 

Here we find ourselves on a bus. In keeping with the conventions of anxiety dreams, we are exposed to others: we perceive the vehicle’s interior as a theatre, filled with observers.  

When you shift your chair just a few centimetres from the middle of the stage, to better see the driver, it falls out beneath you. This in front of a full audience and with a series of glasses below. You are not embarrassed, as its quite spectacular.

You stand up and say ‘my arse is wet’, then some elderly person points out to you your leg had been cut and blood is streaked across your clothes. The glass cuts into your knee joint, you were lucky to not have slashed your wrist. A different older human being asks you, are you alright love? Yes you say, they’re taking effect but they’re not working proper.”

Published : Excerpts from I Will Show You The Life... on Mercurius

Very cool to have four poems from my book I WILL SHOW THE LIFE OF THE MIND (ON PRESCRIPTION DRUGS) published on Mercurius, a journal brilliantly edited by Thomas Helm here free and out like nowt. Please have a peek www.mercurius.one/home/i-will-show-you-the-life-of-the-mind-on-prescription-drugs

These are four special texts, or rather excerpts (as the book is a poetic conceptual choose-your-own-adventure narrative with all text intermingled somewhat), as they include the book’s opening gambit, describing the human brain.

Published : Zones of Darkness, on science writing and my book 'I will show you...'

I was sent this article by a friend, having not heard of its being written. It places my most recent book in its proper place - science writing on the brain, the hard problem of consciousness, experimentation as a purposeful means to get to insolvable problems of language - which is something that hasn’t happened too much, so it was gratifying to read. It mentions Francis Crick and Henri Michaux in the same article too, alongside analyses of Michael Pollen and Charles Murray, and then me. It’s an ambitious piece. More than this it contextualises the real issue of my book - the brain, the mind, what is happening to ours, our search in popular culture to engage / ignore this issue. Anyway, from Eric Jett, Zones of Darkness https://www.full-stop.net/2020/09/16/features/essays/jett/zones-of-darkness/

A note on: Dan Power reviews I Will Show You ... at SPAM magazine

Very good of SPAM and Dan Power to offer this review of my book https://www.amazon.co.uk/Will-Show-Life-prescription-drugs/dp/B0849T1PRK/

A few excerpts from the review, which can be found in full https://www.spamzine.co.uk/post/review-i-will-show-you-the-life-of-the-mind-on-prescription-drugs-by-sj-fowler

> Using the second person throughout, Fowler directly implicates you, the reader, in the story. He speaks as your mind speaks to you. Considering this book opens by addressing the unknowability of the mind, what’s surprising is how relatable so much of this is. Is there a universality to even the most intimate experiences that we might prefer to ignore? Are everyone’s anxieties and anguishes the same under late capitalism? Are we wired up to process life in symmetrical ways, or do the drugs standardize our experiences in-house, making ideas digestible and easily transferable, while at the same time neutralizing them?

> It’s also a choose-your-own-adventure! So Fowler gives us a sense of control, the option to use our unique and free decision-making skills to try and steer ourselves back into the light. Of course, this also means that every terrible thing that happens to you is your own fault, the result of poor decision making, of failing to understand the thing that lives inside your skull. But at least you’re free to choose.

> When Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ‘The Wreck of Deutschland’ is filtered through a mind on citalopram, lines from the seed poem blossom into new poems in the sequence. 'lean over an old / and ask / remember? / can you raise / the dead?' (p.29) is almost the ghost of a thought, coming in blips like a distant transmission. But even when the connection is shaky, the consciousness is definitely streaming. Fowler illuminates the structures of the brain not only through the structuring of the book, but through the deconstruction of the text. Ideas spark up and fizzle away, lines bleed into one another. Like the mind, language is an internalized and navigable structure. when one breaks down so does the other. definitions shift across words, syntax dissolves letters drawn to their nearest partners like magnets. disjointed ideas meet / neurons collide at random when their paths are eroded. incoherence, fractured and erratic decision making. brain structure determines bodily action determines brain structure. We are trapped in constant orbit of ourselves.

> The book is also very funny (I should have spent more time saying how funny it is), it’s wry and sharp in a way that allows you to chuckle with the protagonist at their terrible situation, and without undercutting any of the effect. It’s an infectious humour that’s both sincere and playful, frenzied in a way that lets it emerge seamlessly from the ever-changing currents. It does the essential job of keeping the reader afloat through turbulent waters. This book goes to places which are unstable, alarming, vacuumous, but never beyond seeing in a comic, self-deprecating, self-affirming light. Fowler grins into an abyss of his own making. He shouts into the book and the book echoes back, circles itself, ideas like pages are turned and turned over long after it’s concluded. You feel your brain sloshing about in your skull. It does a backflip.

Published: Liberating the Canon anthology ed. Isabel Waidner

So nice to be included in this anthology, with a piece of fiction, never seen the light of day before, which is part of my Museum series. https://www.dostoyevskywannabe.com/experiments/liberating_the_canon

Liberating the Canon is an edited anthology capturing the contemporary emergence of radically innovative and nonconforming forms of literature in the UK and US. Historically, sociopolitical marginalisation and avant-garde aesthetics have not come together in UK literature, counterintuitively divorcing outsider experience and formal innovation. Bringing together intersectional identity and literary innovation, LTC is designed as an intervention against the normativity of literary publishing contexts and the institution 'Innovative Literature' as such. More widely, if literature, any literature, can act as a mode of cultural resistance and help imagine a more progressive politics in Tory Britain and beyond, it is this.

Contributors

Edited by Isabel Waidner, Liberating the Canon includes contributors working at the intersections of prose, poetry, art, performance, indie publishing and various subcultural contexts:

Mojisola Adebayo, Jess Arndt (US), Jay Bernard, Richard Brammer, Victoria Brown, SJ Fowler, Juliet Jacques, Sara Jaffe (US), Roz Kaveney, R. Zamora Linmark (US), Mira Mattar, Seabright D.Mortimer, Nat Raha, Nisha Ramayya, Rosie Snajdr, Timothy Thornton, Isabel Waidner, Joanna Walsh and Eley Williams.

272 pages
ISBN: 978-1999924508
Dimensions: 5 x 8 inches
Cat No: DW-391