REVIEWS
Shattering the Muses is a work of oblique strategies — a plague of mutating billboards, spiderwebs of poetry, handbills, demands, stray bits of philosophy. It’s overwhelming — linguistically, philosophically, typo-graphically, aesthetically. Intellectually… It is an encyclopedic poem, a story of aesthetic horror and loss. It is clearly Not For Everyone, and it’s not likely to cohere for you quickly and neatly, but it’s a weird joy to think (and feel) through.
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Edwin Turner
Hanshe writes with the ferocity and verve that have made him one of our most provocative contemporary voices, but he has added a conceptual subtlety and a historical insight that make Shattering the Muses a moving elegy for the aesthetic complexity our world is on the brink of losing.
Nicholas Birns
At once poetic & philosophical, utopic & dystopic, tragic & comic, Shattering the Muses is a veritable hymn to the redemptive power of art and literature. It is a poignant and beautifully conceived work of art that in turns dazzles and disturbs, an antifascist art-work that upholds Nietzsche’s promise that one day man may be delivered from the spirit of revenge. Reading Hanshe makes for an extraordinary experience.
Keith Ansell-Pearson
The Abdication is an extraordinary mythic delirium-philosophy, rich with erudition and wit, chronicling the exploits of a Heraclitean prophet ushering in nothing less than the Age of Heterology. Long may it unnerve.
Lance Olsen, author of
Calendar of Regrets
The Abdication is a visionary novel of dangerous ideas, a theological thriller concerned with the absence of god and the question posed by the phrase: Dionysus versus the Crucified. It is as richly allusive as it is physically direct: a novel of revolt that can at times be revolting in its relentless push to break the mold of idealist thought. As well argued as it is intricately arcane, indeed dense with learning and lore, this book is both experimental and assured, a comedy of high seriousness and gospel of the flesh that our winded civilization has needed for 2,000 years. Ridendo dicere severum!
Stuart Kendall, author of Georges Bataille
Hanshe’s phantasmagoric and cunning prose eviscerates accreted mythologies while revealing the tragedy attendant on the death and births of gods. Its controversial premises will enrage and provoke many, but the quality and elegance of the writing will amaze all.
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Nicholas Birns, author of
Theory After Theory