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A Child Is Being Killed: a novelA teenage girl named Shrap is sold into sex slavery by her father in exchange for a corporation. A Child Is Being Killed is a story that is struggling to tell itself; it is a story about a girl whose body and mind are determined to become real through this broken telling. Shrap's words are a vessel that holds the question posed by philosopher Maurice Blanchot: What does it mean to utter, "A child is being killed'? What is the nature and shape of this kind of non-presence? Is it even possible to speak of? At once dissociated and lucid, Shrap's story stubbornly creates an existence out of Shrap, and paints a complicated portrait of her mind and body, amidst a world of men who actively and violently attempt to erase her.
Read online excerpts at 1913: A Journal of Forms and apt. Review it at Goodreads and Amazon. |
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Product Details: Paperback: 164 pages Publisher: Aqueous Books Release date: June 30, 2013 ISBN-10: 0988383780 ISBN-13: 978-0988383784 |
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“She hears her mother’s voice, but it is caught between two echos and a jail.” Wow. No blurb I would write could capture the expansive pulpy difficulty of this saint of a little book. Disassociated, far-flung, atomized. . . how do you dub the streaming pileup of someone lost, unborn, already dead. Porny anime? A hot mess? Female? Carolyn Zaikowski’s A Child is Being Killed, this tiny novel, is a messenger not of “truth” but beautiful wrath. -Eileen Myles, author of Cool For You, The New Fuck You, Inferno: a poet’s novel, The Importance of Being Iceland, and others A Child Is Being Killed both inhabits the terrifying space of its title while giving a singular, lyrical voice to its victim. -Rain Taxi In her devastating and courageous new novel, A Child Is Being Killed, Carolyn Zaikowski renders bodies in extreme states of distress, but also falling [ruptured] into a radical newness. Language, in this complex work, has the capacity to both “constantly redistribute itself” — and at the same time, to be a cry – to the reader, to the child, to the mother, to the beloved always (profoundly) out of reach: to: “Come here/Come here/Come here/Come here.” Political and poetic, this is a work of prose that’s both “undone” and “unspeakable.” In this sense, the novel comes to us through gestures of narrative and sound that, at times, intersect — making a third space. “The opposite of space is love,” writes Zaikowski, reminding us that: “It is okay to not understand. It is okay to look.” And so, reading her words, we look. Because this is a writer who does not look away. -Bhanu Kapil, author of The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, Incubation: a space for monsters, and Humanimal [a project for future children] |