The Green Record

Author: Carlos Lara

Publisher: Apostrophe Books (2018)

The Green Record is a project of "metavocal English," "allowing common words to mutate, hybridize, disintegrate . . . to fill up each page entirely with audiographic data via intentional mishearing." Recalling Lautreamont's famous "chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and umbrella," this book-length poem enlivens the Surreal tradition for our self-absorbed, apprehensive moment. Lara reads our everyday reality as a relentless sequence of misprision which at times, in our most adaptive naïveté, we accept as self-affirmation: "a plain begging for more tomorrows and tomorrow's skin for the sake of more skin." Or, in other moments, the concealment, erosion or even disappearance of what is known or can be known is irrevocable and complete: "I didn't think about the office or god for a month / which was actually a cradle or maybe a Manchurian mirror / it was all whalebone electronic / the stars' manifesto."

“Carlos Lara’s The Green Record erupts from prior time into the future. The spell of the language is cast by density, not unlike a blizzard of kelp magically seeded by an oneiric diver.”

–Will Alexander