Immolation Cycle

Contact info@futuretensebook.com or sam.a.heaps@gmail.com for an ARC for review

A meager sun rises. An man sculpts a woman’s corpse. The ocean evaporates to a crust of salt. A violent man starves himself to death. Workers hold the line. A baby is born. In these essays, Heaps asks uneasy questions about masculinity, art, money, knowledge, and solidarity.

There is an astonishing, subversive logic to the movement of the book, which unfurls, swerves, echoes, and weaves, drawing complex lines between forms of gendered violence, forms of power and domination. “I want to write a male narrative in a woman’s genre,” Heaps writes. Rigorous political and philosophical thought filter through the porousness of the body, mucousy tendrils of being, pain. The simmering despair and rage that underlie our horrific present moment are rendered here so vividly, with such accuracy, sensitivity, and intelligence, it offers a kind of hope. A hand extended, whatever comes next.

Steph Cawley, author of No More Flowers (Birds, LLC) and My Heart But Not My Heart (Slope Editions)