Desert Tiles brings a fresh spin on the "Corraoesque" theme of text / image coming "alive", becoming a "semiotic organism," undertaken here via the twin metaphors of text as a desert and reading as necromancy. The desert here is both literal (as the ever-shifting "dune-script" of meaning) and a place "deserted", a place of the always-already absent voice, into which the reader is invited to venture out. Reading as necromancy entails summoning the voice of the absent/"dead" author, communing with the past action(s) of signification and by decoding it, yielding messages for (some kind of) the future.
"Read this geometry in such a way as to allow the text unit increment itself to be unbounded, allowing for fragments of itself to be discorporated in such a way as to interlock-in voxelized gradient-with vacancies identical to those fragments excised from the primary corpus of the text unit itself in such a way as to be both of itself and containing another, like a splinter of bone healing into liver tissue."-John Trefry, author of Plats
"Mike Corrao's Desert Tiles takes an ekphrastic approach to our probable swallow by ocular data. The writer/reader is in a state of pixelated becoming. There is no what it/we/they become(s), nor how, nor why, even - a barely-where "textures are compressed and corrupted" and a barely-who "hums their jaw against the sand." Something is in process of being downloaded, devoured, dissolved. It's icky, because it's true. What happens when the happening is pure mechanics, an I thinking and therefore (without reason). As the body is desertified, the body-esque remains: a fine-grained graphic that "yawns and weeps" even while you (the body? Or body-esque?) "want to cry, but are incapable." In the poem "you ask yourself if this still counts as lived experience," while IRL you are wondering if you count as something R and L? Or "is its not being real really that important?" A proper noun believes in something, like the moon landing, or politics, or that 7up & saltines will cure a stomachache. "The static speaks to me." Poor robots, I think, poor tin man. A heart and blood are black and white and indexed quietly, and the index beats. Who will read all the indexes left behind, desiring their un-deserted world? One might desire the desert. Liking the gray sand. And then what."-MJ Gette, author of The Walls They Left Us
"Set in a desert created by a 'borgesian deity, ' a wandering 'wastrel-form' encounters a Necromancer. This isn't the Desert of the Real, but a literary simulacrum where wanderer and Mancer engage in a dance of death (or birth)? Corrao reveals a book giving birth to itself, not as a postmodernist contrivance, but as a slow-paced prose poem. Body horror collides with a kind of digital mysticism. With both words and images, we witness a sky the color of TV tuned to a dead channel and the birth of the new flesh."-Driftless Area Review
