About the Book:

“Occasional lapses in grammar punctuate a text that capitalizes nothing but “I.”  Unbound qualifiers—sur-real—empty the world of our hidden habits to “fill your stomach’s groan with a charcoal sketch of naked trees.”   When Klingbeil says “gothic,” plotting the reader’s location in space, nothing gothic appears to be here, on this plane: “I’ve confused the noun of this graph already.”  This poetic “portmanteau” is concerned with the junctures of meaning and experience: “I think lost in translation is an ever-present term.”  Klingbeil’s book is more than it seems, reversing Levinas’ contention that responsibility for another derives from one’s subjective condition:  “name a device for perpetuating a recurrence of yourself.”  evaporatus seems a purposefully overwrought way of articulating our old and unchanged and reproductive dependence on the power to name: “meiosis most appears through hanging string from name to name.”  The thread of “I” is tenuous, painted in the end-game of these removes.” — Jared Schickling

“In the beginning there was the word. And then God gave Adam the power to name. Christopher Klingbeil’s Evaporatus works within the trouble with language, with naming, and its many failures, even as he troubles the language for us. “so much time has passed within this grammar it’s getting hard to tell.” Where a sentence starts doesn’t necessarily tells us where it will end, just as the names of things are not necessarily what they are. “calling the cave, our cabin, for instance”. When language tries to science, and science tries to language, you get an exploration of the power of naming and what it means to be called. “claiming the evaporative properties of soil by calling your name again and again” evaporatus surprises, delights, and also breaks one’s heart just enough.” — Amber Nelson, author of In Anima: Urgency

Learn more about Christopher Klingbeil here.