Part of the World by Robert Lopez
Part of the World by Robert Lopez, faculty, Creative Writing at The New School.
Calamari Press, 2009
Barnes & Noble: “Part of the World is a fugue in both a musical and psychological sense. It is a canonical juggernaut of lyrical language–ever dissolving, devolving, shifting, then reconstituting itself into a new knowledge of reality. This language comes straight from a compulsive mind in a Quixotic state–ceaselessly harping on the everyday perturbations and peculiarities of our humdrum lives–our cars, apartments, health, finances. But if you relax your focus as if staring at some sort of holographic fractal, with each part containing the whole, the superficial meaning is purged, layer by layer, peeling back and revealing the subtext of what the mind is capable of under the burden of trauma and accountability.”
“Robert Lopez has written a darkly hilarious exploration of the trickery of memory, the unreliability of personal history, and the strangeness, even uncanniness, of our daily transactions.”—Dawn Raffel
“Literary pleasures like this are all too uncommon.”—Laird Hunt