Honey Protocols by Monica Rinck, translated by Nicholas Grindell

Description

Among many other things,Honey Protocolscan be approached as a dictionary (offering peculiar and extravagant definitions of creatures and concepts alike), as a routine documenting its own abolition (48 of its 66 poems open with the same phrase, escaping this compulsion towards the end), or as a book of tall tales (in one, two men sail a three-masted trampoline out onto a lake, the trampoline capsizes, they sink, the lake spits them back out onto the promenade). The collection might also be read as a dreamlike visit to the battlefield where the kind of stories we like to tell ourselves cross swords with the kind of stories that are constantly told to us (and sold to us) by the massed forces of mockery (with tech support from the Delphic engineers).