www.philipquinn.ca
"Writer "
Review-Front and Centre
This book
will make you wet. Wet and dislocated; possibly disoriented, depending on
your orientation. Gutter Press—Canada’s boldest explorers of literary
possibility—have done it again with Quinn’s Dis Location. Like Derek
McCormack’s Dark Rides of a few years back, Dis Location is a book uneasy
with classification and difficult to summarize. But the reader does know
some things: there has been a flood, water sloshes and gurgles every which
way, and the town where things are happening in Dis Location is populated
with some very weird folks. Quinn writes like a man trying to deliver a
speech with his mouth full of socks. You get muffled bits; fragments; the
gist; themes. Examples: sex, highways, teeth, cemeteries, caskets, weather,
parkas, film and sex again. You fill in the rest.
At times
Dis Location is reminiscent of Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, but pared down,
because of its obsessiveness, its unorthodox sexual component, its
meandering style, and above all, its general weirdness. Or here’s another
comparison, perhaps more apt: reading Quinn’s book is like being stranded on
an outcropping of rock in a river swollen after a flood, a river that sits
next to a flea market, taking inventory of whatever floats by: the
proverbial flotsam and jetsam of humanity and its many peculiar ways.
Quinn’s insightful ruminations and odd ball characterization makes all that
is awash here fascinating.
Matthew Firth
