The Slow Road to Gore by Alex Staines poetry book now on Kindle

The 2010 second edition of The Slow Road to Gore - A Travelogue Noir (poems by me and illustrations by Aaron Frater) is now available for purchase as a Kindle e-book, on Amazon.

Here's the book on Kindle.

There's a lengthy book description to accompany the Amazon listing, which I have included in the current Kindle copy as a Foreword.

However, I aim to replace this version with a new version soon that is better formatted for all Kindle devices (there are various complexities associated with uploading Word files to the Kindle platform that I have since become aware of). The "View Inside" option on the Kindle page shows some formatting errors that may carry over into some Kindle readers. It's a bit of a tricky business, but I'll update this post when the new version is uploaded. I have spoken to several people who say it looks and reads just fine on their Kindle readers, and it looks A1 on my desktop version of Kindle, too, but I'm seeking perfection!

I was planning to remove the Foreword from the updated version of Gore, and have installed it here as a page.

The updated Kindle version of the book will have a link to this page instead of the text itself. This is so potential buyers of the book can preview more of the poetry, as the preview pane on Kindle only allows for people to read a couple of pages. I don't want half of this taken up with a foreword spiel which is kind of self-indulgent (though fun).

Alex Staines new poetry project under way

The follow-up to Seclusion Data, a new poetry project titled Time of the Archons, is well under way. The focus with Archons is on a music/poetry album and video, rather than on the printed volume and live performances that characterised Seclusion Data.

Part of the Archons project is to re-record the vocal and re-mix the Seclusion Data tracks currently on Soundcloud, and re-release this as an album on Bandcamp, prior to the release of Archons.

Steve Wolf has composed keyboard tracks for the Archons album, and I'm rapt that talented Wellington composer Brad Jenkins is working on electronic music to accompany Steve's piano compostions.

And of course, the poems. I've finished 12 out of 36. The Muse is an inconsistent diety, or rather my responses to her are inconsistent. I know what I'm doing and the poems will be finished - I'm thinking around mid-2016 (this year).

Review of The Slow Road to Gore by Sam Gaskin in Salient mag

Staines’ self-published ‘travelogue’ offers a fantastically skewed picture of New Zealand through a staccato progression of poems (including distinct urban and natural scenes, character portraits and mini-narratives) from Te Kao, north of Auckland, progressively southwards to Bluff.

I doubt that Tourism New Zealand would recommend Staines’ depiction of Aotearoa to would-be tourists. The road to Gore is not always clean and green but, frequently, positively bloodstained. The poetry’s bizarre violence is at its most effective when attributed to the hypocritically moralistic. When one animal advocate, for example, overhears a ‘cowboy’ state, “sheep is just mutton on legs”, he sticks a pencil into the cowboy’s chest “til he felt the lead / snap against the spine”.

Also, unlike the ‘Pure’ campaign – which is unsatisfying for Kiwis because it promotes an absence – Staines’ New Zealand is dynamic, gritty, abundant and culturally diverse. We encounter vagrants, amputees, skinheads, an altruistic Ukrainian, a ‘militant hippy Cantonese greengrocer’, and a multitude of madmen with various compulsions.

Staines’ manic, dynamic, style is at its best in poems like ‘the voice of Foxton’. He captures and entertainingly exaggerates the earnest devotion to bizarre identities and activities that undermine small-town New Zealand’s dull reputation.

At times the attempt to jam poems full of New Zealand’s many disparate actual and imagined elements, and the occasional use of over-elaborate diction, don’t allow the reader to form an image or establish a mood. Aaron Frater’s accompanying sketchy illustrations often exacerbate the incongruity of some poems by too literally representing too many aspects of Staines’ imagery.

One of the most successful poems, ‘Saturday afternoon in Kawakawa’, is more simple, personal, and – ironically – surprising. After trying on sunglasses at Mitre 10 and visiting a Vietnamese bakery, the speaker and their companion ‘inevitably / pash’ (which is such a great New Zealandism that my spell-check doesn’t recognise it). There is nothing inevitable about any of these activities – they don’t stop at a sunglasses store or a French bakery – yet it is these unexpected details that make the poem such a lucid representation of both a New Zealand town, and of the speaker’s infatuation.

Although not always successful, The Slow Road to Gore’s detailed representations, vibrancy and strangeness offer enjoyment from plenty of readings.