How Syd Staiti's The Undying Present 'Makes Life'

In a new review for Jacket2, David Buuck revisits 2015's The Undying Present (Krupskaya), by Syd Staiti. "In many ways, the book reads like poet’s prose," writes Buuck. "But it also reads in conversation with European or Latin American traditions of the novel and cinema, as opposed to the selfie-consciousness of American autofiction or some strands of third-generation New Narrative." Further thoughts on Staiti's use of subjectivity:

…Indeed, subjectivity here is less about interiority and introspection, or reports of semi-ironic perambulations through postmodern urbanity, but rather focused on its unfolding in direct (and indirect, mediated) contact with the city — its architecture, its passageways, its concretized fetishes and enticements. The novel interrogates what it feels like to live through a catastrophe — our catastrophe — however shrouded in mystery, in the interregnum where the old world is not yet dead, but the new world has yet to be born. Not via recourse to zombie symbolism or other such dystopian tropes, nor the hand-wringing anxieties of US lib lit, but rather the everyday shuffling intellect of engaged, curious citizenship all-but-trapped and yet availing itself of language and narration — not to “make sense,” but to make life.

“Every theory in the present is speculation” (21). This might sum up the inventive poetics of Staiti’s novel, in that the writing of the undying present must by necessity become a kind of speculative fiction when confronted with the task of worlding…

Find the full review at Jacket2.