“Golston’s writing is beautifully pitched, alive with a sort of dark excitement. We are, after all, undertaking journeys without a known destination, journeys that can take us deep into the earth’s core or up into the starry void. Golston certainly theorizes these itineraries—Benjamin, Deleuze, Jameson, and others are active presences here—but his expository prose is also braced by popular idiom and by the wild vocabularies his exemplary texts evolve.”
—Peter Nicholls, author of George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism
"Michael Golston’s new book is a grand turning and re-turning of the irrealities of sci-fi beamed out of a literary critical Zeiss projector, illuminating the alienness that needs to be palpable for the real science fiction of poetics. For readers of formally active poetry, this is a necessary, consequential intervention—and it is also more fun than criticism ever realized it could (should) be."
—M.R. Hofer is a professor of English and the director of literature at the University of New Mexico. He serves as the editor for the UNM Press Series Recencies: Research and Recovery in Twentieth-Century American Poetics.
"Golston takes his readers on a mind-bending romp through twentieth-century experimental poetry, from the futurisms of Velimir Khlebnikov and Mina Loy to Clark Coolidge's crystallography, Sun Ra's Afrofuturism, and Evelyn Reilly's reflections on styrofoam. Poetic innovators, he shows, have been consistently influenced by science fiction not only in some of their themes and memes, but more fundamentally in their formal experimentations. Science fiction poetry, a perpetually overlooked genre, is not only alive and well, but has roots running rhizomatically back to the early twentieth-century avantgardes. Landmark theorists of culture from Walter Benjamin to Deleuze and Guattari similarly ground some of their most important metaphors in science fiction, opening up a new universe of science fiction-grounded criticism. A riveting read for readers of poetry and science fiction alike."
—Ursula K. Heise is a professor in the Department of English, serves as Marcia H. Howard Team Chair in Literary Studies, and serves as the director at the Laboatory of Environmental Narrative Strategies at the Institute of Environment and Sustainability at the University of California Los Angeles.
