Sherwood Forest

Author: Camille Roy 

Publisher: Futurepoem (2011)

The forest is a place of refuge and story, created by characters who enter and enlarge it beyond the fantasy of any one person. Authority is diminished and recuperated. Personalities perform themselves via vivid and anarchic gestures. A condition of dereliction becomes the arena where bodies rustle with erotic pulse. "My hope was that this book would be entered as its own social space. Like a gay bar of the fifties, entry would signal that you have taken membership in a stigmatized community, with the risk that entails. Can readership entail risk? Readership as a secret society.

"Camille Roy rides the catch between poetry and prose like a girl who grew up riding horses. Her steed through Sherwood Forest feels a lot like R. Crumb, you know, big women piggybacking little men and everyone living in a female forest (I believe) or else this reading journey feels like the rational mind on a weekend holiday with fantasy and lust bridled only by the limitation that it sound good and Sherwood Forest absolutely does."

–Eileen Myles

"In its capacity to stop time, Sherwood Forest opens its reader to a future made "suddenly visible." A "narration" that's both "desire" and what incubates it: the capacity to "float." Imagine a forest floating in the air. Camille Roy does this. She is a writer who lets her reader dream, past tree-line. Where the sentences flare and dim, like 'sexy bodies.' Like a memory of touch. Like "body parts" and 'tissue'—a luminous genitalia—above a pond."

–Bhanu Kapil

"Sure smells nice, Sherwood Forest, and sounds pretty too, thanks to the tirelessness of Camille Roy's registration. Who wouldn't want to draw breath there, a kind of exquisite corpse that, for once, would be sublime. A picture of communal free will, drawn on the wall. The best hospice for despair, Sherwood Forest is where natural desires go to look in the mirror and die, for once, gracefully."

–Bob Perelman