Cronk, Olivia: Gwenda Rodney

Meekling Press, Publication Date: October 1, 2024 Publisher Marketing:  Olivia Cronk's Gwenda, Rodney is an exquisitely genre-ambiguous “poetry novel” scintillating with art, ardor, and decay. It's a book about reading novels, ekphrasis, and the gaze, transcribed in a mode as ethereal as air filling a garment left to hang. Inspired by theater, Dario Argento's luscious horror aesthetics, the gaudy-spectacle-art of Toulouse-Lautrec’s paintings and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s films, and the feeling of reading novels like drinking endless water, Gwenda, Rodney, is an inspiration, an exhalation, a quivering ruby of obsession on display. Olivia Cronk is the author of WOMONSTER (Tarpaulin Sky, 2020), Louise and Louise and Louise (The Lettered Streets Press, 2016), and Skin Horse (Action Books, 2012). “There is a great excitement in reading Gwenda, Rodney, like coming to Mina Loy or Silvina Ocampo or Fleur Jaeggy for the first time, a feeling that you are experiencing literature at its most ex