Librería Samer Atenea
Librería Aciertas (Toledo)
Kálamo Books
Librería Perelló (Valencia)
Librería Elías (Asturias)
Donde los libros
Librería Kolima (Madrid)
Librería Proteo (Málaga)
'The Clock Had Not Yet Struck Her Prettiest Distance' is a collection of three surrealist poetry books by Dale M. Houstman. Each book differs in source material, form, and emotional ambiance... 'The Starlit Dog: and Other Tales' an illustrated book with texts inspired by fairy tales, that dark fountain of psychological matter; 'Enfleurage' composed by utilizing pulp detective texts, and itself divided into three parts; 'Calcutta Orchids' a series of minimalist poems imbued with a mytho-poetic atmosphere, a sensation of place. These three books were created in 2007, 2001, and 1991 respectively, as the book moves backward in terms of initiation, headed for a wellspring. Although these three sections differ by way of their variety of settings and tones, their unifying force is founded in Surrealism - the philosophy of liberated imagination - and also in a ’making’ free of obligatory and arbitrary strictures. Surrealism is not - and never will be - a literary style, a toolbox of 'proven' techniques, nor a fatuous machine of self-expression. Yet the work does not lie beyond comprehension or pleasure, even as it refuses the anchor of comforting paraphrase, which can only offer up a reassuring 'meaning' while discarding the poetry, now rendered obsolete by exegesis, or - more precisely - by the egoistic projection of opinion. Another discernible and unifying quality of the three books is the prevalence of whimsical and childlike elements scattered throughout, having blossomed from a consciousness enriched by such artists as Lewis Carroll, Arthur Rimbaud, e.e. cummings, Benjamin Peret, and Alfred Jarry, as well as from fairy tales, science fiction, comic books, a persistent resistance to the mundane, and a yearning for a revolution of consciousness, in which there is no separation between the intended and the accidental.
