A Brief Compilation, by polycarp kusch. Reviewed By Lynn Alexander. polycarp kusch has an ebook collection housed at The New Absurdist, featuring an assortment of writers, misanthropes, and malcontents.
A Brief Compilation is an ebook offering at The Absurdist Monthly Review, and features collected shorts by polycarp kusch, who claims to have invented the letter D and emancipated himself as a young child to live as a hobo in New Jersey. Only polycarp knows the extent to which the miseries that befell him in those formative years took their toll on his creative processes and subsequent rise to prominence. Only polycarp knows if that Stormtrooper he stuck in his pocket that day at Bobby’s did in fact turn out to be valuable despite having been removed from it’s original packaging.
What is apparent is that poor polycarp was permanently and irreparably demented socially, such that he remains incapable to this day of performing essential tasks in public such as grocery shopping, Chinese food ordering, parking spot selection, negotiating postage.
He really had no choice but to become an eccentric hermit, did he? So he wrote, between hospitalizations and incarcerations. One could say he triumphed over his circumstances.
In these stories, polycarp uses fiction to play out his mommy issues. In “Daddy Drinks Because You Cry” he describes the changes in sexual desirability of the mother character before the scrutinizing father. (Yes, kill him, marry your mother)
He stops short of actually describing her breasts preparing for lactation in the service of the soon to be born deformed infant whose sloped head makes him sound less like a child and more like Gumby. But he wants to talk about them. You just know it. Later, there’s the tale of the clever surrogate, and on page 7, a reference to “tittering”.
Mothers appear again in a tale about Santa Claus, another story -incidentally- with grown men crying, the second major theme in this compilation. Clearly polycarp wants the reader to know, in the wise words of the musical act R.E.M. : Everybody hurts, sometimes, everybody cries.
Polycarp tends to describe small, mis-shapen, or defective people, with physical maladies and missing or diseased limbs. Many have developmental disabilities. He describes things that defy science or logic: a single individual filing away, the need to get one’s affairs in order for a soon to be destroyed world.
Surprisingly, and perhaps the product of a deep rooted empathy developed while living at the vacant lot as a hooch drinking beggar, polycarp’s stories are often reflective, with pivotal realizations.
Gott Milk? by polycarp kusch is another collection of absurdist flash fiction shorts.
Polycarp starts off with romance thwarted by narcolepsy, then a failed scissor shop set in 1972 whose owner ingests two bottles of advil which had yet to be invented. Is this an absurdist device, meant to confuse the setting, the time and place? Who knows. At least now he has the wikipedia.
Elms grow where there are mid-August monsoons. A tree house budget becomes municipal. Fish become municipal.
“The True Nature of Chickens” is pretty good. Some hits and misses for me. The writing itself is better technically, but not even close to what he is doing now.
Maybe it’s time for ‘The Definitive polycarp Collection.” There are some pieces of his at The New Absurdist site that are hands down better than what he has in here. But still, they are entertaining reads.
Links: The New Absurdist
Absurdist Monthly Review- Download Current and Back Issues
To download bizarrEbooks: Go here at your own peril.
