The Fabulous Ekphrastic Fantastic! by Miah Jeffra
Author: Miah Jeffra
Title: The Fabulous Ekphrastic Fantastic!
ISBN: 978-1-943977-73-4
Library of Congress Number: 2019953146
Publication Date: 03/20/2020
Retail Price: $18.00
5.83 x 8.27” Paperback; 140 Pages
Distributed by Ingram and Sibling Rivalry Press
Author is available for appearances and interviews
Publisher Contact: [email protected]
Press Sheet
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SUMMARY
“A river’s edge, if approached too close, can sweep a body beyond itself.” In The Fabulous Ekphrastic Fantastic!, Miah Jeffra perfects apostrophe as canticle, a host of heroes beckoning the reader deeper into the waters of selfhood, Madonna, Mary Shelley, Felix Gonzalez Torres, Plato, and Jeffra’s mother among them. Jeffra explores the nature of gender, sexuality, aesthetics, and love, taking a tiny hammer to the stability of the limits of perception, troubling the tether between perception and memory. At once memoir and cultural criticism, this collection discovers itself as a book about forgiveness, family, and the truths we find in “the lightness of a door,” “the probability of a radio,” the long line between one story and another.
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PRAISE
“Miah Jeffra writes somewhere between a scream and a growl, in short energetic essays that queer the language in exciting ways. In a letter to the late Keith Haring, Jeffra writes ‘I want to feel like a bandit, a punk, a renegade.’ And indeed he takes us on an outlaw's journey, provocateur and picador; flaunt and flirt. Here is a writer who grabs the reader by the balls in all the ways one hopes to be testicularly taken.”
— D.A. POWELL, author of Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys
“Both tough and tender, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny and other times direly serious, Miah Jeffra flips the script in these essays on art, danger, seduction and sexuality. Moving between critical, narrative, lyrical modes Jeffra illuminates and entertains. I loved this book.”
— KAZIM ALI, author of The Secret Room: A String Quartet
Miah Jeffra is one of the most interesting writers working today and his new book, The Fabulous Ekphrastic Fantastic!, is among the most unique you’re likely to pick up this—or any—year. I could describe the book as part memoir, part criticism—but that wouldn’t do justice to the electric, eclectic way Jeffra straddles and subverts
genres. Instead, I’ll suggest this: go and read the book and see for yourself. You’ll be happy you did.
— CHANAN TIGAY, author of The Lost Book of Moses: The Hunt for the World’s Oldest Bible
“Miah Jeffra is that rare writer who’s as committed to the individual sentence as much as he is to developing a bold, animated vision. These short pieces are nothing less than an ongoing art of survival, and they’re irresistible in their force, innovation, and vulnerability.”
— PAUL LISICKY, author of The Later: My Life at the Edge of the World
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PREVIOUS PRAISE
“Through these dexterously choreographed essays, Miah Jeffra perfects a grim exuberance that comes to suggest a new optimism. There is generosity here despite our capacities for self-righteousness, predation, and social inequity. I leave The First Church of What’s Happening believing that what Jeffra evangelizes is resilience as a necessity, not a virtue.”
— DOUGLAS KEARNEY, author of Buck Studies
“Miah Jeffra does not use his imagination to protect himself or to protect us. Instead, he gives us stories of reckless tenderness and anger and sorrow and lust—that overflow with images of wonder and desire. How wonderful!”
— ROBERT GLÜCK, author of Denny Smith
“Shot through with humor, anger, and a deep, deep love—for men, for humanity, for language ... in lush, risk-taking prose, Jeffra explores what it means to be queer, alive, and struggling in high-tech, low-empathy America. He takes the pulse of
the now and quickens it with this sparkling debut.”
— JANET SARBANES, author of Army of One
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BIO
MIAH JEFFRA is author of The First Church of What’s Happening (Nomadic 2017), The Violence Almanac (Black Lawrence 2021), and co-editor, with Arisa White and Monique Mero, of the anthology Home is Where You Queer Your Heart (Foglifter 2020). Miah is founding editor of queer literary collaborative, Foglifter Press.