The Rapture of Eddy Daemon

Finally: a posthuman translation of Shakespeare. I'm glad Daniel Y. Harris beat Watson at it. There are still large chunks of human in his kind lineation." —Andrei Codrescu, author of Bibliodeath: My Archives (with Life in Footnotes), (Antibookclub, 2012) In The Rapture of Eddy Daemon, Daniel Y. Harris has composed a wild poetic drama through realms of eros and spirituality. His writing is simultaneously playful and profound, transmuting ancient symbols and concepts into a contemporary wisdom, heretofore unknown in poetry. —Daniel C. Matt, author of the first nine volumes of the annotated translation, The Zohar: Pritzker Edition, and of The Essential Kabbalah, and God and the Big Bang Daniel Y. Harris has a perfect ear. Pass it on. “It’s the last season of day one.” Crisp consonants frame smart vowels betwixt parentheses that host deliciously true songs. Whole verse thrums from peak to sprawl. He crafts high-frequency fluidity. Each sonnet is agleam with future friction, “revers(ing) this law of creation.” The litmus state, “Unborn in choiring wings,” reminds us that “The topos is in the billions.” Each fleck of this multiplicative joy ride earns a resounding “YES”! —Sheila E. Murphy, author of more than 30 books of poetry, including Letters to Unfinished J., winner of the Gertrude Stein Award by Green Integer Press, and Continuations (with Douglas Barbour), co-founded the Scottsdale Center for the Arts Poetry Series. Though last words are rarely included in blurbs, Jack Spicer’s “My vocabulary did this to me” is apt praise for Daniel Y. Harris’ linguistic tour de force, The Rapture of Eddy Daemon, which is a procedural and meta-linguistic commentary on Shakespeare’s sonnets and so much more—from Faustian saga of human creation to an ode to the mechanical and posthuman methods of gaining access once again to the imagination. The circle/cycle is unbroken and broken simultaneously—and that is the joy of this big, ambitious, and brilliant riff on what “revision,” at its most exuberant boundary can mean. Read th is forever and then start again. —Maxine Chernoff, author of Here (Counterpath) and To Be Read in the Dark (Omnidawn), is Chair of the San Francisco State University Creative Writing Department. The fourteen-line sonnet form is the setting for this epic homage to the Bard. Harris’ bold achievement is nothing less than a sustained ecstatic idiom—a combinatoria, encyclopaedic in range, via which this daemon, this genius, this attendant spirit he calls Daemon eddies uninhibitedly. —Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino, author of The Valise and Editor of E·ratio To be Human or… Posthuman? That is the question Daniel Y. Harris asks in The Rapture of Eddy Daemon, his new techno-savvy collection; an alluring post-avant garde ‘frieze of parabola and rosaries... eccentricities and personae’. Outraged critics may balk at the esthétique du mal infusing this neon-lit sonnet-homage to the Bard, but disregard their slings and arrows – just fasten your seatbelt for this white-knuckle ride through a multifaceted New Inscape of poetic phantasmagorical visuality. —AC Evans is the author of Fractured Moods (Atlantean Publishing, 2012) The originality of Daniel Y. Harris’ writings is a multilayered surprisal, one of joyful momentum and challenging nuances that alters the reader’s understanding of language. In essence, one of the gifts of The Rapture of Eddy Daemon is its ability to advocate for poetic language, but too, for language in a general contextual awareness. This superb collection will create neoteric discernment for the reader ready to delve beyond what is currently being written. Harris has created, through Daemon’s interaction, something very new and deliberate, —something truthful into the paradigm of what creates rapture and its subsequent experiences. —Felino A. Soriano