LITERATURE

By Steven Zultanski

7 December 2020

Fiction is no match for reality, and here’s all the dis-proof you need. A mash-up of poetry, polyphonic musings, drawings, and bitter irony, Seth Price’s new book, Dedicated to Life (2020), is a perfect mirror of our twisted present, and his self-imploding mind.

“The drawings reproduced in Seth Prices’s new book of poems and fictions are vaguely psychedelic and a tad grotesque, with a lot of white space so that the figures seem suspended in, or emerging from, voids. In one, a ghostly body tears open its own chest to reveal a pair of dice inside, like terrible organs that literalise chance. Much of Price’s work has dealt with corporeality and intimacy – as in the high-resolution photos of skin, or the moulds of bomber jackets that suggest absent bodies – but it is in his drawings that he reveals his true existentialist streak. There, one senses a straightforward vulnerability and perversity that can help illuminate his cooler, more conceptual projects.”

– The full text appears in Spike #66 . You can buy it in our online shop

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