THE AVERSIVE CLAUSE
SHORT FICTION; Black Lawrence Press / Dzanc
“(The) Aversive Clause is hilarious, absurd, frank, somehow honest, somewhat blasphemous, and wildly original. I’ve never read stories like these, but I’ve always wanted stories like these. B.C. Edwards is both a wordsmith and a riot; they exact kind of riot we need.”
-Justin Torres
(Edwards) is a writer possessed of a quicksilver anarchic imagination and I recommend his fiction highly to all and sundry.”
-Patrick McGrath
B. C. Edwards’s debut collection is a menagerie of possible and impossible worlds united by desire and the search for the answer to that most basic of questions: who am I? It was Chekhov who said that “The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them” and even as The Aversive Clause reminds us that there’s more than one way to ask the same question, it shows us that sometimes the question is the answer, for as long as the asking lasts.
-Dale Peck
Edwards is somehow both irreverent and heartfelt, funny and sweetly earnest. The stories in The Aversive Clause are the work of a gifted and playful storyteller.
-Seth Fried
HTML Giant calls me a “latent science fiction nerd” which is totally true
The Nervous Breakdown tells me I’m talented and to please shut the fuck up
Lambda Literary says that I merge “the fanciful with a strong emotional core”
Barn Owl says I’m a “connoisseur of metaphor and simile”
Literary Aficionado calls me “Bizarre and immensely gifted”
TOR calls it “a cross between Etgar Keret and Harlan Ellison”
NEXT Magazine lists it as one of the Best upcoming Gay Books of 2013
The lovely queer lit blog Band Of Thebes says that it totally exists and is worth checking out
And here are some places where you can order it:
FROM THE STANDARD CYCLOPEDIA OF RECIPES
POETRY; Black Lawrence Press
What a mesmerizing, bossy, unstandardized book. It’s hard to know what to compare it to, other than its near-namesake, but why would you. B.C. Edwards has (re)invented something here that keeps telling you exactly what it wants, what to do-yet finally you have no idea what it wants, or what to do. Well, it knows, but you have to read it to the end to find out, and by then it’s too late: everyone’s bleaching skeletons and writing in silver and trying to figure out what to do with all the love.
-Mark Bibbins
Entering From The Standard Cyclopedia of Recipes is like being left alone in a strange and secretive museum of marvelous oddities. Each poem is a new cupboard of the mind, filled with rare and revealing objects that sometimes delight and sometimes destroy. Eerie poems that plumb the depths of longing are matched with haunting, modern love poems that hum on in the dark. In this smart and surreal debut, Edwards brilliantly exposes the many lost things within us “until there is no perspective closer than this.”
-Ada Limón
After reading Edwards’ book, I still don’t know what to make of it. I know it’s a collection of recipes, and that each of these recipes is part curse, part love poem, and part black-hole. I know that the recipes embody epiphanic tangents which deposit their readers into zones of mystery and darkness. I know that they induce a vertiginous feeling, but the vertigo is soft and inviting. I know that the book is ostensibly a collection of poems, but the “poems” it contains outstrip that classification with each idiosyncratic colloquialism and shimmering line they contain. Most importantly I know that this strange book brings me rare comfort by its insistence that truly, I know nothing about love, or poetry, or chaos, or language. Nothing at all.
-Ben Mirov
TO MEND SMALL CHILDREN
POETRY CHAPBOOK; Augury Books
B C Edwards 