Speculate: A Collection of Microlit

By Eugen Bacon and Dominique Hecq

From what began as a dialog between two adventurous writers curious about the shape-shifter called a prose poem comes a stunning collection that is a disruption of language—a provocation. Speculate is a hybrid of speculative poetry and flash fiction, thrumming in a pulse of jouissance and intensity that chases the impossible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Jan 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9781946154569

Eugen Bacon

Eugen Bacon is an African Australian author of several novels, prose poetry and collections. She’s a British Fantasy Award winner, a Foreword Book of the Year silver award winner, a twice World Fantasy Award finalist, and a finalist in the British Science Fiction Association, Aurealis, Ditmar and Australian Shadow Awards. Eugen was announced in the honor list of the 2022 Otherwise Fellowships for ‘doing exciting work in gender and speculative fiction’. Danged Black Thing by Transit Lounge Publishing made the Otherwise Award Honor List as a ‘sharp collection of Afro-Surrealist work’. Eugen lives in Melbourne, Australia. Visit her website at eugenbacon.com

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www.meerkatpress.com

in lieu of a preface

by Dominique Hecq and Eugen Bacon

This book began as a dialogue between two adventurous writers curious about the shapeshifter we call a prose poem, that can be the hybrid of a poem and a flash fiction. Aware of our penchants and differentiations, we pushed ourselves to detach from each of our safe zones—for one, it was speculative fiction, for the other, poetry.

Our goal? To disrupt our writing practice by snatching in foreignness, seizing the uncanny in all its strangeness.

But why?

Though it may be true that, as writers, we think we inhabit language, there are times when we feel language is not ours. And, of course, it is not. How exhilarating, we thought, to expand our horizons! And so, like two lovers in a provocation game, teasing and pulling while thrumming antiphons in a pulse of jouissance, much playfulness in the enfold of intensity, we chased after the impossible nonrule of emancipated association in reacting to each other.

We hope that in reading these prose poems you will make your own connections and draw, if you wish, your own conclusions and associations without working too hard, without trying to detect patterns or contexts that might decipher the covert intentions of uncapturable text. There is nothing homocentric to find here, no preferred way of reading that is key to opening some academic or other discourse. Touch the text, taste it, feel it—do not try to contain its abstract language.

We invite you to be part of a spontaneous conversation that comes along with no headings of love or childhood or death or dissolution . . . Each prose and its response is an echo or a divergence of an element that one author’s text stirred in the other.

As award-winning poet and academic Prof. Oz Hardwick said in a radio interview with East Leeds FM, prose poetry trusts its own momentum—the rules of verse do not dictate it. Prose poetry is not for people who are afraid of language. It’s start, off you go—musicality in the verse.

One might describe some pieces as complex, relentless, but above all, speculating or crossing borders in the fantastic playground of language. We invite you to leap onto the stage of your own imaginings, plunge into what Henry James called the house of fiction.

This is how we envision ours:

A single detached house tossed out of Speculate settles across your dreams. Skin, paper-thin, desiccated and scripted like a collage, covers the absence of doors, thresholds, verandas, stairways and footpaths. But there are windows and louvers that look out to rain-licked grasslands. This is a house unsealed, with the sky art and earth art washed or rolled into each other on adjacent floors and walls. The roof, unlettered, is made of two sliding suns of creamed panels, foundation-like. Round the back is a rope ladder that will win you over. Up, up you go. Enter with care as you would any fiction that blurs the boundaries of genre, mode or form, that goes beyond the written and borrows from the unwritten. Together we can interweave art with language and watch it shape itself anew in an endless process of spontaneity and play because we can be here and there and away, all at once.

It is our hope that perhaps you may allow Speculate to be interactive, that you may find your own deep pleasure in engaging with speculative dialogue and playing with fluid text unencumbered by logic.

Part I

Eugen Bacon & Dominique Hecq

[Hecq’s italicized responses to Bacon’s prose poetry]

Evridiki

Friends are not important—like plagues, they come and go, even blood is not thicker. But fate is another matter. Some fool in autumn had a drink in the dark, sought a taste of heaven in a street named Bagh Nakh. Found it in the hands of a runaway who raised a hand and plunged a dagger that clung to the idiot’s heart.

* * *

You were born in autumn and so, naturally, hate spring. The scent of blackwood showering pollen. The air licked with gold where the buzzing of the bees deepens. The sudden opacity of it all. You run. Run away. Away from the visible and from the invisible. With the pollen clinging to your skin, the sun striking and the darkness beneath your feet settling, you are a living phobia. A fear of no consequence. Yet as eons pass in one beat of the heart, you hear the rustle under the trees. Taste the bite of death.

She steals at dawn

to a place of memory, a beloved place she can enter her stories. The way her fingers pad on the keyboard. The rush that sweeps through her body arrives her at an intersection where mind and fingertip are one. She needs practice sleeping in a little, her lover’s breath heartfelt on her earlobe. But she runs when she can, to a play-filled memory enriched with mannequins she can chase, surreal encounters on red

Reviews for Speculate

[linda.a. · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This thought-provoking collection of Microlit incorporates prose poetry, speculative flash fiction, and cameo-like word sketches. The book is divided into two sections, with Part 1 featuring Eugen’s writing first, with Dominique’s response to it on the opposite page, then in Part 2 this interaction is reversed as Eugen responds to Dominique’s work. Sometimes the responses continued a theme, sometimes took it in a completely different direction, but they always succeeded in generating a conversation between the two authors … sometimes deeply reflective, sometimes full of teasing repartee, sometimes provocatively challenging. Although some of the pieces are as short as a couple of sentences, and none any longer than a page, the interchanges between the authors added depth and complexity to the ideas being explored. I always found myself wanting to re-read each piece, sometimes several times, not only to reflect on their thought-provoking, insightful ideas and imagery, but to relish their imaginative, expressive use of language.I loved the sense of fun which emerged from their verbal riffing: interchanges which frequently felt akin to, and just as enjoyable, as listening to one of my favourite jazz groups. As I was reading I found myself wanting to join in, to add my own thoughts, ideas and improvisations. I really enjoyed this interactive element which was, I felt, encouraged by the free-flowing nature of the authors’ exchanges, as well as by their explicit ‘invitation’ in their introduction to their collection.Although this is a relatively short book, I think it’s not one to read quickly but is best enjoyed in small ‘doses’ in order to enable the magic of it to develop in those spaces which, with the best writing, occur between reading, reflecting and gradually absorbing what you’ve read. I’ve only recently become aware of Microlit but I love how it can encompass a range of ideas and themes in such a succinct, yet powerful, way. Extra layers of pleasure in reading this book were provided by not only the striking cover, which is eye-catchingly bold and satisfyingly tactile, but also the imaginative interior design. Most pages feature graphics, some of which are simple, others more complex and intriguing and I loved the shaded grey monochromatic background, with the contrasting white typeface, to some of them. All the time I was reading, I felt these designs, the work of Meerkat editor Tricia Reeks, were constantly adding a powerful extra dimension, that they were enhancing the ‘colourful’ prose from both authors. In many ways this has been a difficult review to write, not because I didn’t enjoy it (by now it will be clear that I did!) but because I know I can’t possibly do justice to the range of feelings, themes, ideas and reflections which the authors explore. All I feel I can do is to encourage anyone who loves playing with language, words and word association, and who relishes being encouraged to ‘think outside the box’, to get hold of a copy of this collection from two remarkable wordsmiths. Their individual styles may be different, but their creative collaboration has resulted in a ‘whole’ which feels so much greater than its constituent parts. It has been a joy to share (and feel part of) their intimate conversations and to gain a sense of the mutual respect which underpins their relationship. With thanks to Meerkat Press for providing me with my copy in exchange for an honest review.

[angelajmaher · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A series of dream-like pieces of writing. Do they make sense? Perhaps not if you try to analyse them, but the flow has sense beyond normal reckoning. These evoke pictures and feelings that will change with each reader. These are a beautiful experiment. Abstract art in prose.