Static Mantis

by Arran Fisher

Static Mantis is an investigation into our experience of reality, a challenge to the idea that works of fiction, or the fictions that we create for ourselves every day, are required to hold any consistency or similarity to the “real” world. Insects, space travel, the apocalypse and The Beatles swarm in clouds of randomized particles which disperse and settle, showing themselves to be neither more nor less substantial than the simple fact of existence.

Awards/Award Nominations

Shortlisted for the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry

Reviews

Fisher is obviously enchanted with puns, double meanings and wordplay of all kinds, and the result is hilarious. ~Alexander Rettie, Alberta Views

Fisher has a genuine flair for the sparkling image … his long frequently stream of consciousness passages are peppered with staccato bullets to the brain; in other words images that delight and surprise. ~Angus Leech, Calgary Straight

Like automatic writing, it makes leaps in logic, finds loop holes in meaning, slips from one plane of the real to another through sound, sense and image. ~Kemeny Babineau, League of Canadian Poets

Static Mantis requires a totally different kind of attention — attention to what slips through the lacunae in disjunctive narrative; attention to the non-sequitor; attention to surreal leaps of language and thought. ~Richard Stevenson, The Danforth Review

Samples

Sunlight diffused the buildings…

Sunlight diffused the buildings – a slow motion Xerox making its locust billionth pass as he exited the copy centre. He thought about photocopies and insects the way they reproduce and multiply like downtown buildings bombarded with photons each day like the next instant the sky opened up and either darkness or bits of paper fell upon the city. Like a New York parade or a pause between copies, a lapse between yesterday’s and tomorrow’s edition of scarab billion limited view of the Shriner’s float from this angle.

He couldn’t cross the street because the band marching past just like the present cloudy conditions threatened to rain the plague. He thought about the ants go marching ant by ant, an army of sequence playing “Scotland the Brave” all bagpipes and confetti. An envelope held moth-hundred copies of the manifesto, all about Armageddon between the numbers, the parade, the Sun, the bodies, the copies, the weight of the papers under his arm. Gravity and the one about procession and the roadside attraction.

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist

“You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out why they never admit to the subplot behind the White Album.” Last week it was satellites and how his dog knows when something’s the matter like an atom or the universe, more space than substance, more forest than trees. The antimatter shortage and the big bang conspiracy. “It’s a huge narrative about the rise and collapse of the American dream, from the bubblegum parody of Back in the USSR to the apocalyptic riots in Revolution 9.” Galaxies turn and accumulate, records broken back to records sold. Money makes the world revolt at bumble bee point aphid degrees from the ecliptic – a seasonal angle of insurrection, El Niño formation. “Mild winter but we’ll need five or six chinooks before the snow pisses off.” The insect resuscitation, slower after a record season.