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Antique Densities: Modern Parables & Other Experiments in Short Prose

by Jefferson Navicky

6 x 9; 106 pages

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Antique Densities: Modern Parables & Other Experiments in Short Prose is a collection that flickers between the surreal and the recognizable, between poetry and fiction, between this world and another.

About the Author

Jefferson Navicky is the author of the story collection, The Paper Coast, and the poetic novel, The Book of Transparencies. His writing has appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Electric Literature, Fairy Tale Review, and Beloit Poetry Journal; his short plays have been produced across New England. He has been awarded a Maine Arts Commission grant, two Maine Literary Awards, and was the 2019 winner of the Maine Postmark Poetry Contest. He is the archivist for the Maine Women Writers Collection.

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Endorsed by Kristen Case

Among the many delights awaiting the lucky reader of this book, perhaps the greatest is the utter unpredictability of its language. In these pages, one encounters a diverse array of familiar figures, from pop singer Justin Beiber to legendary literary critic I.A. Richards. Like the elements of a dream, these personages are both themselves and not themselves, and as one reads one begins to wonder if one isn't also becoming not-oneself, but someone wholly else, perhaps a character in the book's pages.

Antique Densities is a joyful counterspell to the curse of disenchantment, a long, beautiful string of unforeseeable sentences. And as Gaston Bachelard asks in The Poetics of Space, a book that bears some secret kinship with this one, "if we render speech unforeseeable, is this not an apprenticeship to freedom?”

—Kristen Case, author of Principles of Economics and Little Arias

Endorsed by Stephen Petroff

Antique Densities, short prose poems, “parables and other experiments,” are rarely more than a page in length, yet there is nothing miniature about them. First, there is the beauty of the writing: page after page of the coziest, most unsettling characters and situations thus far found, in Maine, in the 21st Century. Libraries open their doors on each page of this slim volume.

You’ll see what I mean. These pages interlock, like ancient paving stone . . . all stories here will be found to serve each other, deeper and finer than I have known. Jefferson Navicky mentions writers he admires – Kafka, Borges, Cortazar, Yourcenar – “elders of influence.” They are no longer merely his models. With Antique Densities, Jefferson Navicky is their peer.

—Stephen Petroff, author of Philosophosphorescence

Endorsed by Jaed Coffin

Antique Densities is a wild story-map of glowing imaginations, surreal hallucinations and timeless contemplations. There’s a dream-sequence to these winding narratives, one that reveals itself in layers of strange and beautiful meaning. In creating this collection, Jefferson Navicky has done that magical thing that so many writers and artists fear: he’s let his deepest literary influences wander rampant through the pasture of his consciousness, and the result is a stunning alchemy of authenticity and homage.

—Jaed Coffin, author of Roughhouse Friday

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