Ben Segal’s “Tunnels”
Wednesday, August 21
Doors: 7:30pm
Reading: 8pm
~
Find yourself at the Poetic Research Bureau on August 21st as we celebrate the launch of Ben Segal’s latest book, Tunnels. Joining Ben for the book launch will be novelist and essayist Lily Hoang.
Tunnels is a fractal novel, or an architecture for narrative wandering, or a three-dimensional maze and flip book. It is a rigorous formal experiment in the tradition of the Oulipo, and like much of the best Oulipian work it engages in extreme formal play without jettisoning the ordinary pleasures of fiction (narrative propulsion, evocative imagery, emotional resonance). The book takes place largely in a fictionalized version of the California desert where the land is riddled with thousands of tunnels, and which has attracted a cast of outsiders who live in unstable community beyond the margins of society. The form of the book allows the characters’ stories to collide and unwrite each other, and the reader is invited to explore a network of passages with unfixed meanings that cohere into a sense of place.
~
Ben Segal’s narrative cat’s cradle, designed with geometrical precision, suggestive indirectness, and carnivalesque imagination, explores book as activity, novel as poetry machine, page as visual event, and reading as mystery, motion, curiosity, surprise, puzzle, pleasure, lostness, and termite tunneling. Beautiful and brilliant.
— Lance Olsen, author of My Red Heaven and Skin Elegies
A dozen years ago, Ben Segal asked me to imagine that I had just read the most amazing book I had ever encountered, and to write a short blurb for the fictional tome. I offered: “Set in a grid, the book’s words can be read conventionally, across the page, as well as down each column. But they can also be read as stacked strata. By opening up the z-axis to reading in this way, The Cube recognizes the book as a three-dimensional sculptural space.” Miraculously, he was working on just such a book, and here it is, even more amazing than I had dared to dream. Amaze, as it happens, is the root of maze, but Tunnels is a labyrinth, so all the roots here, like all the routes through its narrative possibilities, are rhizomes.
— Craig Dworkin, author of Helicography
~
Ben Segal is the author of Tunnels and Pool Party Trap Loop, co-author of The Wes Letters, and co-editor of The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature. He has been published widely, including by The Georgia Review, Tin House, Wigleaf, Puerto del Sol, and others. He is also an attorney working on climate-related issues.
Lily Hoang is the author of seven books, including Underneath (Winner of the Red Hen Press Fiction Award), A Bestiary (PEN/USA Non-Fiction award Finalist), and Changing (recipient of a PEN/Open Books Award). She is a Professor of Literature at UC San Diego, where she teaches in their MFA in Writing.