Cella Fantastik

Adam Engel has been writing for many years. In 2010, he published his unparalleled collection of essays, written during the early years of the Bush/Cheney "administration," I HOPE MY CORPSE GIVES YOU THE PLAGUE: MY LIFE IN THE BUSH ERA OF GHOSTS. The year before that, he published his linguistically stripped and poetically dystopian novel TOPIARY, a book distilled from ten thousand pages written over a decade. Now, Engel brings us another book, in fact another genre, in CELLA FANTASTIK: A BOOK OF PROEMS. The pieces here are neither poetry nor prose: They are unique in form, since their form is determined by the uniqueness of their author's purpose. "The novel is dead," Adam Engel has written, and "poetry has been marginalized. But literature must live if we are to retain what remains of our 'humanity, ' or the noblest traits of it. In order to live, literature must grow and change." Flip CELLA FANTASTIK open to any page and you will find treasure of one unexpected kind or another. What you find will always be in control of its genre instead of its genre being in control of it. Engel's proems are always compelling, always conscious of the literary tradition they come from-and always rigorously and intentionally different from it.