Liminal Space : Essays from the In-Between

Liminal Space: Essays from the In-Between, is ostensibly a collection of essays which depicts the uncanny happenings of our bewildered raconteur. However, beyond the persiflage lies a veritable politico, who gluttonously indulges in aesthetic philippics; an amaroidal commentary on gossamer conceptions of essentialism, truth, and reality. Perhaps this sounds like acrimonious esoteric bilge, or, worse yet, somniferous self-referential rhetoric. But our narrator's journey is not palpably anon; it is sinuously parlous. The reader is led into oft neglected, caliginous, worlds which entertain, as well as proffer a guide to the perplexed. The essays, or perhaps more accurately, pithy narratives, follow no perspicuous chronology or teleological, pastiche, path. Rather they exist-reconditely-concertedly as independent pieces and threads of a tautly woven web. The narratives themselves are constructed of hybrid (non)fictional accounts. There are tales, recitations, and remembrances of experiences with mental illness, disenfranchisement, propitious contracts with reality, eviscerations, moral impecuniousness, sugar, tattoos, drugs, and cigarettes. The narratives are speciously about our narrator's life, but if one pricks the surface, one is inundated with a stream of portentous consciousness. None of the multitudinous characters (re)presented in the chronicles is, including the narrator, "real." They are, rather, an amalgamation of the myriad people with whom I have interacted on this earth. The process was not unlike Zeuxis' modus of painting his version of Aphrodite. Each character is a monster, constructed by selected fragments of wholes-the rebarbative classmate from 5 years ago; an affable,nameless, man with whom I shared an epigrammatic conversation on a bus in Pittsburgh; an unknown neighbor; and a long dead friend-dialectically fused, creating neoteric entities. My face etiolates as I, manifestly, cognize I am walking perilously close toGermain, S. St. is the author of 'Liminal Space : Essays from the In-Between', published 2004 under ISBN 9781413443677 and ISBN 1413443672.