Suicide by Language — a novel by Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino

click to download the free .pdf of Suicide by Language — a novel by Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino —

ē·

 I know of no writer so dedicated to walking the tightrope of his own investigations—and the results can be exhilarating, baffling or both.  I think of Suicide by Language, is a kind of kintsugi bowl, fragments held together by the lacquer and gold powder of St Thomasino’s process. 

 

—Peter Kenny

 

 

Coming soon. . . .

Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino’s Suicide by Language explores a contemporary “wasteland,” but one with far more daring, humor, and raw nerve than found in the denizens of Eliot’s “unreal city.”  

There is no conventional plot, but we wander through this linguistically constructed landscape with a world-wearied and beleaguered pilgrim who nonetheless maintains a wry and often humorous cynicism.  Following the advice of the fabled fox, this narrator follows a crooked path in an attempt to elude his devils: “In the morning we recalled the exhilaration we felt when we were running away.”  There is a sense of exhilaration as we move from fragment to fragment, as the effect of it is more akin to hypertext, or the beautifully dis-jointed editing of Godard, who St. Thomasino credits as the inspiration behind his novel.  As we explore the humor, absurdity, and sometimes agonies of isolation and fragmentation, other possibilities for meaning emerge—dandelions “but no daisy,” a crystallization and dispersion of desire, like seeds in wind, or a Deleuzian rhizome.  

 

This brilliant, provocative novel is also a manifesto for poetry in the age of “post-truth,” “relativity,” and a pop-cultural landscape where taste seems pre-supposed as “manners,” and our imagined superheroes utilize “sneakiness” and “dirty looks.”  As with Godard, St. Thomasino’s response is innuendo, style, suggestion, and an always “cool” command of language that flickers across the page in a kind of dream logic: “Dreams are in the body.  The mind just reflects.  And like a mirror, everything is backwards.”  The sequences in his novel have bodily heft and psychological depth.  Godard’s characters are often doomed to failure in the conventional sense of story and plot.  But, as St. Thomasino recognizes, they are able to mine far richer ore in the aesthetics of spirt and the imaginary.  

 

St. Thomasino’s Suicide by Language is brilliant, daring, and necessary.  

 

—Jonathan Minton

Coming soon. . . .

SUICIDE by LANGUAGE succeeds St. Thomasino’s recent novel STEPHEN’S LANDING.  Tho it’s not until the last page, that we learn, This novel was inspired by the work of Jean-Luc Godard.  And again . . . inspired by the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet.  French New Wave cinema continues to startle and fascinate, so it’s not surprising that that era’s operandi, endures to nourish our own metatextural Neo-genesis.  

As such the novel leaps to cleanse itself of any incarnation or fanciful metempsychosis, essentially in the service of wide-awake facticity and realist veracity.  St. Thomasino’s humanistic metaphor-shy expedition, bolts together, in sum, a wild filmic primer.  Prep for turbulence nevertheless, and fierce cyclonic gravity: . . . the doodle of the Wonder Wheel.  Surreal effects flicker and penetrate the presumptive commonplace, the everyday savage vacuum of familiar assumptions, with tact and poise, and best of all, thru many fun and humorous conflicts.  

 

There are hints of plot.  But it’s emphatically Eros all the while, that fuels, invigorates, the anti-normative narrative.  Passion, often as anguish, complex into delicious (binary) woes: The taking of Elian at gunpoint?  In all, I particularly enjoy the writing’s exuberance, its jouissance, flickers, and surreal effects.  It’s a case of the incredible shrinking life.  The book examples how the combustable person, caught in the propositional present, survives proprioceptively, “as” love.  

 

The manuscript breaks into four parts.  The last section blithely revisits, mirrors the first, which necessarily clusters-together ruminative fragments.  She did the whole first chapter of The Whale for me.  We’re talking magnitudes and properties, she said.  Seems some letters are more equal than others.  Be prepared to withstand these literary mechanics: If you want to stretch a sweater sleep in it.  Poetry and prose often miss-mingle; thus for the reader, no easy précis.  

 

Consider the book’s epigraph.  Listen!  They are saying: Give us Barabbas!  Wait, hasn’t a universal froideur always overshadowed this bit of scripture.  Nevertheless, and we have no doubt: reliance on violence, will spill, from political necessity.  How to countenance this, unless as here, obliquely.  The metaphysical descent of self, the irony of death, simply adds to the price of a better world.  Did you say something Corky ?  The word you are looking for is holophrastic.  Thank you, Corky.  

 

—Jasper Brinton

 

Coming soon. . . .

Suicide by Language, Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino’s new novel, is fragmentary, aphoristic, fractured, but above all provocative.  St. Thomasino eschews plot-and-character development for the blank space of the page, for the shimmering emptiness of screen.  The result is a sort of performance of erasure implicating less the death of the author/narrator than of the poem/novel narrated by itself.  The reader is told that Suicide by Language was inspired by the work of Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Robbe-Grillet—and indeed, with these auteurs, St. Thomasino shares an anti-narrative impulse, but he takes it a step further.  This is a conceptual work, in the sense that this breakdown, this blankness, could be asserted as “hero” to its anti-text.  No matter your expectations, this work will surely confound them.  

 

—Mark DuCharme

 

Coming. . . .

In Suicide by Language, Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino masterfully stretches a sweater into the definition of novel.  His often comical and ironic textual inventions that make up the storyline could leave the reader on a beach wondering whether the protagonist is beneath the deep blue or somewhere darker.  Be warned: All is well, Corky.  The only magic wand that may free the reader from St. Thomasino’s page-turner is a Portable Jung or Flowers of Evil.  

 

—Rich Murphy

 

Coming. . . .

Reading Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino’s new novel: Suicide by Language is a continuously revelatory experience; we move through beautifully supple changes in address and lexical register, situations opening up and following myriad different implications implicit in everyday language enriching our sense of occasion and occasions.  Our language carries us and lays us open in its structures and deflections.  Under the changing and sometimes urbane surface, there is a keen wildness at play here.  The effects are exhilarating, absorbing, addictive and often very funny as St. Thomasino lays bare the double-binds and warp in the weft of our assumptions:

She is too intellectual to have children.  The biology of childbirth disgusts her.  She said the whole birth and death business, why subject a loved one to that.  

Such a passage might remind us of Gertrude Stein: the fast connotative crossing and blurring, the burst of vividly-expressed passion and the subtle shadow realisation there would of course be no “loved one” without the “birth and death business” (and how uncannily that seemingly nonchalant “business” rings and expands in the mind).  In this novel, our preconceptions in following such writing are always illuminated and transformed.  This is an artist in full and confident flow, riffing and revealing the tangents and rifts in the way we think words and word thoughts.  There is a sense of an angelic marauder about this novel, a filmic and insatiable curiosity taking us on and over, through leaps of group and situation and word-meshes, a vibrant and sensuous awareness at loose among the ways we pattern our perceptions in speech and print.  This too is more than addictive.

 
—David Annwn
 
Coming. . . .

In the great tradition, stretching back at least to Leaves of Grass, of landmark books that just happen to be self-published, Suicide by Language has arrived.  David Markson titled one of his brilliant novels This Is Not A Novel.  On the very first page of that work, Markson writes, “Writer is weary unto death,” and “Writer is equally tired of inventing characters.”  Or consider that Homer created two epics, and Louis Zukovsky, some three millennia later, wrote one (at least according to the nomenclature of many commentators).  As radically different as Homer’s poems and A certainly are, what they share is that flowing radiance of language characterizing any literary masterpiece.  “Novel”: from its inception, an experimental genre, one that despite Sterne and a handful of others ironically hardened into a form with arbitrary requirements.  But halleluiah!  Markson and now St. Thomasino have blasted that random definition to smithereens.  

—Joel Chace

Coming. . . .

Water. The rising to newness.

Read an excerpt from Suicide by Language at Dispatches from the Poetry Wars —

“This movie was shot on cell-phone video. It’s the footage of the head of Jacques Derrida on the body of the Bigfoot.”

“Poetry and wallpaper. It seems to me this poetry is better suited for wallpaper. My reaction is to say, if you make enough of it you can do a wall.” 

 

Read an excerpt from Suicide by Language at The Tower Journal.

In Rapsodia 17, fall 2017, a long excerpt from Suicide by Language.

“In the envelope, this letter, where it read, You are too well-balanced to be a poet. Your poetry insults the poetess in me. And in the margin, Quite so.”

“It’s proper for the poet to from time to time have the gendarmes at his door.”

Read an excerpt from Suicide by Language at The Tower Journal.

Soloiste! Soloiste!

They point at me and scream, Soloiste! Soloiste!

I scream back at them, Agoniste! Agoniste!

Read an excerpt from Suicide by Language at Posit.

She was from Germany. She wanted to see where Lennon was killed.

And if you were a flower you would be a . . . touch-me-not?

“I was madly in love with her for two years, and when we broke up, amicably, she gave me back everything I had left at her apartment, everything except my volume of Neruda’s love poems.”

Read an excerpt from Suicide by Language at A-Minor Magazine.

If I am reborn, bald, bearded and hunchbacked.

There is a marriage in Cana of Galilee. And a paralyzed man at the pool at Bethesda. Do not have contempt for my misfortune, you who are at ease. And you who put a stumblingblock before the blind. My lover is made whole this very hour.

I am the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valleys. As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.

I weepeth sore in the night. My tears are on my cheeks. Among all my lovers none can comfort me.

And there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain, for the former things are passed away.

Roses and apples Dorothea. In the garden of her heaven. At the moment of her death.

Tell Hum. I am Jairus’ daughter. I am not dead. I am only sleeping. My lover whispers, Talitha cumi.

Eleven-hundred silver shekels. Tie me with seven new bow strings. And weave into the warp of a web seven locks of my hair. Dagon.

When two will make only one, when outside will be like inside, and when there will be neither male nor female.