Black Sun’s first single-author title, GNOME by Robert Lunday, will be available for purchase February 14, 2017. Preorder Gnome from now until February 1 and receive a free copy of VESTIGES with your purchase.
Self-reflective, discursive, and painfully studied, Gnome is a poetic and phenomenological excavation of shadows; the tragicomic dimensions of our inner curiosities and longings that wait pensively to be ruptured into epiphany. Employing a language that devises to question the renegade forces of experience that the soul must both adorn and endure, Lunday confronts the unstable yet tempting relationship between expression and proof, memory and personal reality. Invoking physiological positions from figures ranging from Georges Bataille and Max Picard to Kōbō Abe and Elaine Scarry, Gnome is a monologue of mad reveries that endeavors to develop its own impression of love and death, proving that the surfaces we encounter are the materialization of the endless depths at our disposal.
Click here for U.S. preorders ($14.99, no shipping fee).
Click here for international preorders ($19.99, $5 shipping fee).
Be sure to specify which issue of Vestiges you’d like to receive in the special instructions field before checkout, or email store [at] blacksunlit [dot] com and include your Unique Transaction ID number in your message.
Preorders will ship the week of February 6.
Advance praise for Gnome:
“Years in the making, this trance-inducing exploration of the body—and particularly the face—as ‘the ground of myth’ is a phenomenological wonder. How does Gnome manage to be simultaneously convergent and divergent, recursive and surprising, uncanny and familiar, densely erudite yet resonant with internal space? Reading it, I felt as though I was wandering inside a hypertext or undergoing a labyrinthine initiation. ‘The eye has no home other than its blind spot,’ Lunday declares—and I believe him—yet page after page I found my vision newly refreshed. This is one of the biggest reads of my millennium thus far.”
—Claire Bateman, author of Leap
“Robert Lunday is one of the most unique voices in contemporary poetry. At once eloquent and inquisitive, his poems are meditations on the history of physiognomy as well as the nature of personal reality. Reading Gnome, I felt as if I were reading the words of a visionary who speaks to the mystery of life itself, and of the dream we are all living.”
—Nin Andrews, author of Why God Is a Woman
“Gnome—in which poetry takes upon itself again its ancient impulse to think within the beauty it pursues—is worth pondering in all its homonymic oddity. Lunday’s book is the guide we did not know we needed: guidebook to our own face, the fact of having a face, all it forms and all that forms through it, expression of eye and expression of words, and those worlds of thought behind the blank stare.”
—Dan Beachy-Quick, author of gentlessness
Visit the Gnome page for additional praise, excerpts, and product details.
Interested reviewers: Email editors [at] blacksunlit [dot] com for an advance review copy.