Bird-Self Accumulated

By Don Judson

"When BooBoo stabs Morris Boyle I am reading a news magazine that someone has smuggled into the wing."
Thus, the protagonist of this novella introduces us to prison, one of the several worlds he inhabits, worlds most of us would rather ignore but which inexorably, through what we see and hear and read and live on uncountable American streets, has become the one world we can no longer avoid. It seduces us with the voice of drugs and violence. Of the disenfranchised. Of those both at once outside and standing within the center of what no longer holds. It informs us of who we are today.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0814742297
• ISBN13: 9780814742297
• Release Date: March 1996
• Publisher: New York University Press
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.61 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.3" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Hard, brutal, intense, provocative

Judson's minimalist poetic prose leads the reader to a sucking black sinkhole in which we find our common selves exposed. His characters repulse, yet we recognize ourselves in them. A brilliant read. What's next from this author?

A work of genius

Only Dostoyevski on his bad days approaches the profound despair that illuminates this book. It asks fundamental human questions, and the answers are always those of nihilism. Yet the characters of the book flame with life, are real and hungry and lusting. They are "workers in the realm of death"just as are the soldiers in Ernst Junger's STORM OF STEEL, the great novel of WW I. But these are just hoods, punks, scum. Though they live, breathe, and want as do the rest of us. The moments pass by like heavy, leaden sentries that guard a secret no one wants to know. But Judson draws us ever nearer the secret in a brilliant, lyric prose that would seem to be totally alien to such a world, yet expresses it perfectly. Hell is a poem. And the wretched, deranged, violent, and angry, are the poets. There are very few books like this in American literature, and it really does take genius to create such a book. We are such stuff as nightmares are made of, and we know it.

A disquieting and fascinating journey. Read it!

An unsettling, no-holds-barred journey down a reality road that few of us (fortunately) ever travel. Insight into a perspective that most of us never experience, but one that can brutaly and shockingly burst upon us at any time. I found Judson's book both disquieting and fascinating. Read it!

This is one hell of a trip!

Judson writes with undeniable power and street savvy. The generating forces of the narrative, as well as its effect, is intensely brutal and unsettling.

great!!

Someone had said this was a lot like Denis Johnson and I read where the author said while he'd written the book before Johnson's Jesus Son, when reworking he had certainly been aware of Johnson and had even used a few of his poetry lines. But let me tell you this is much more intense and deep than Johnson will ever be. One of those books that twenty years later, someone says "how did we miss it?" READ THIS!!