from The Boghole & the Beldame (12) (Lune) - Softcover

"To read Joanna Ruocco is a good time. A racy one (nouns and verbs do not stay in their clothes!). But what is more, the keening logic that undercurrents JR’s dazzling language in The Boghole and the Beldame is no less than a short course in the cartography of transfiguration. The “likes” and the “unlikes,” like otherworldly pearls that weight the story’s threads, are indicators of a deep pulse-motor churning in the guts below the text’s surface. And so we move closer to something more like the consciousness of the rhizome. One resulting gift? The glorious invitation to consider relational modes that open us, rather than close us, into all that is not known."— Selah Saterstrom

A previously unpublished selection, Joanna Ruocco's The Boghole and the Beldame is a pastoral hallucination—more spell than story—that harks back to the waking/walking life of an archetypal dreamer. Afoot in the muck of language, Ruocco paints a thicket in which every shimmering growth baffles the landscape. The characters—creatures, figures, names—in The Boghole and the Beldame lean against time, pluck it for quills, wring its veins for blue, and blush black. Ruocco knows language like the tongue knows teeth. Here is a gateway to the everywhere of your ancestral sleep.