The Animal of Existence

Author: Jared Daniel Fagen

Publisher: Black Square Editions (2022)

"Language is a dangerous burning woods. ‘What's at stake is thus far what survives the inferno’. And in those hot thickets, The Animal of Existence by Jared Daniel Fagen is itself a complex animal—crouching, questioning, restless, at times stalking the edges of consciousness, at times wild of mouth, with an electric charged bite. It offers a series of poetic prose texts, hybrid in their inventive logics of narrative and syntax, each piece carrying distinct music and texture. ‘I am walled and rung alive by your love, your love annihilated me from the territory of circumferences, of your retina.’ This book powerfully wrangles alienation and identity as well as grief, hard feelings, and ‘the mourning dusk of us’. The angles are vividly torqued and they touch the delicate nerves. ‘Say I a wound instead.’"

-Sawako Nakayasu

"In these epistemological bulletins, where the end is found to be endless and the image is the debt of the animal's awareness Fagen drives the apple of articulate injury with 'molten' address and hallucinatory panic."

-Carlos Lara