The Exponential Stone by Andrew Joron
Essays and Interviews
“Andrew Joron in these pages summons, out of water, stone, mathematics, mirrors, and much else, the ever-replenishing presence, within a surrealist life, of astonishment. The hidden nature of nature, the occult call of disarray, the alchemical end all events crave, it’s all told here, as Joron unveils the dream life of critical thought. By turns lyric, speculative, rigorous, wry, and exhilarating, these texts are attuned to the eternal, to the contemporary moment, and, let it be said, to vibrations of love that flow forth from the sun at night. The Exponential Stone sings and thinks at once. It’s an essential work in the poetics of our moment.”
—Joseph Donahue
“Like Robert Desnos as Louis Aragon described him, Andrew Joron proves himself in The Exponential Stone to be ‘a remarkable sage, with strange ships moored in each fold of his brain.’ This intoxicating, erudite collection is studded with unclassifiable literary treasures: Paul Scheerbart’s study of perpetual motion, Augustine’s meditations on mirrors, the scientific and philosophical speculations of Novalis. The studies of Barbara Guest and Will Alexander alone could transform a young writer, or even one not so young. For all their digressive sweep, the pieces trace out a rich and coherent conceptual space, a literary vision that takes the full measure of surrealism and its contemporary clades. A delight to wander through the world that it imagines!”
—John Beer
“A metaphysician-musician of the soundless, invisible yet-to-be, in this latest constellation of prose Andrew Joron is an etherphone operator who listens to the supra-human humming of Earth. Under the shapeshifting sign of Surrealism, especially moving are his appreciations of Barbara Guest and John Yau, Clayton Eshleman and Michael Leong, as exemplars of dissonance and ethical affirmation. Erudite, alchemical, esoteric, all these insurrectionist apologies and angular modes of critique—lectures, interviews, theoretical wagers, avant-garde poetics—are clear and concise in querying ‘the wailing emanation of the void’s own disquiet’.”
—Andrew Zawacki
The Exponential Stone
by Andrew Joron
$21.95, paperback, 184 pp
ISBN-13: 978-1-968422-12-7
