Sandy Florian’s 2010 book, On Wonderland & Waste, directly challenges the convention that writing must be either identifiably poetry or prose. Florian’s writing could be called both: it is driven as much by story as fiction is, and as much by the music of words as poetry is, but it might be more accurate to call it neither, since Florian’s style and point of view vary widely, moving from interior to observer, from literal to metaphorical, analyzing to undergoing, sometimes all within the same sentence:

She woke up, said, “I gotta get a coffee,” and left. It was that way with her. She could be so distinct in her habit, her world, that each time she went for coffee she left a limb in his bed next to him. That was all he saw. An arm. Or a leg pressed against his hip or shoulder. To her she left a lasting impression of her heart. Or her heart itself as it lay there still beating. She was just taking her liver and lungs for coffee.

And later in the same story:

Waking became falling as this felling became them. She became both bucketed and hung. He became both tenses without a present. The trees were submerged by salty seas. And the cities became him. Distant. Underwater, she grew odd limbs on different parts of her body. And from her heart, another arm extended into the darkness and reached for things she couldn’t name. She asked him, once, what names things went. He replied by building seven walls on a landlocked providence.

Florian is doing the literary equivalent of collage: she builds meaning out of blocks of phrase taken seemingly from different realities, or the same reality as seen through different lenses. At one moment, the reader sees a couple in bed, and the next, the impossible has happened: she’s left her limbs behind, her heart behind. Just as the reader jumps to the conclusion that we’re now in “metaphorical” territory, Florian pushes the idea further: now her characters are growing new limbs, building walls, playing with the idea of words and meaning, what is possible and impossible.

Enter Alexis Mackenzie’s collage illustrations, which were created in direct response to Florian’s text. Mackenzie draws from antique fashion, botanical and medical texts, building fantastical chimeras of rosy-cheeked flapper girls striding atop skeletons on a landscape overlooking a chemical model. A grinning, 50’s era man wears a helmet made of a single, immense vertebra. A slim, graceful, Gibson-girl type sprouts plants from her eye sockets or lies draped on a section of cranium, with purple flowers blooming from her torso. Mackenzie draws on the collision of the unchecked verdancy of nature and the controlling, ordering desire of science. The fusion is unexpectedly rich, magnifying the tension between textures and colors, hard edges and soft lines, and the underlying ideas of the way we observe objects as tame or wild, visceral or intellectual, specimen or concept. Mackenzie’s and Florian’s work are direct echoes of one another: restless, time-traveling, shape-shifting internal worlds.

On Wonderland & Waste is exactly what its title suggests: the moment you open the book you are sucked down a rabbit hole into a world where time does not move in a single linear direction, where characters are not limited by physical possibility, and where stories have permission to play out as they do in our imaginations, back flipping, sailing sideways, crashing and burning and then starting all over again:

Is it my time to ask, Johnnie? Is it my imagination? Have I slipped? Have I fallen? Which way did I go?

I told him stories. Stories about my past, stories about my future, and how these stories link up with the present. I said things that didn’t resonate with the truth in my center. I told him about waking and walking and moving myself in a linear direction toward myself.

Is it time for me to go?

I was spinning in the opposite direction. I couldn’t catch up with the truth. I needed more time to think. To let my mind wander. To recalculate my dreams and discover a new equation. I wasn’t ready. It wasn’t time.

My center was warm. Exterior emblazed. Tar Black. And inefficient.

I had run out of time.

With no place to run.

Then gravity caused my fall.

Off the curb and onto the street.

On Wonderland & Waste
by Sandy Florian
Collages by Anne Mackenzie
(104 pages/Sidebrow Books, San Francisco 2010)
ISBN-13: 978-0-9814975-1-8

posted by LJ Moore   editor(dot)moore(at)gmail(dot)com