Michael Schuffler: Mascot Anastasia (prone as snowmen)

What does it mean to "use" words? How do we render words our accomplices as writers? Is that relationship consensual? What are words' own perspectives as living entities? In Mascot Anastasia (prone as snowmen), Michael Schuffler helps us to imagine what words might feel, enriching our relationship to language beyond what we can make words do on a page. A slim, 40 page pocket book, this startling collection asks us to reckon with our power to name(-/and)call. It is a tiny, perplexing, densely crafted work to be considered over time.

"For this form of correspondence, Michael Schuffler surrounded his name with earth, watched its waves invert, shiver, suffer. But here there is something else. His letters know themselves fully, like an axolotl gliding at the bottom of an extinct lake. They look up at the reader, hovering, subterranean, growing gills, pushing air through newly hatched lungs, their ambidextrous angles dining on sky."

-Eric Baus, author of The Tranquilized Tongue (City Lights, 2014)