Follow the science into a panic room whose walls are the fear of death. It has a window you duck down beneath, the fibro rattling like an n-dimensional membrane as thin glass shatters to ornament your back like that of a stegosaurus. But you will survive as those brainless dragons did for aye—and look, the toilet altar stands unshaken.

"Oyster Mountain is a resounding answer to a pronounced contemplation, that of the avant poet’s place in an increasingly decentralized art culture. Jalal’s preoccupations are cosmic and vast, incorporating narrative forms, comical sleight-of-hand, and zeitgeist subversion into a kaleidoscopic immersion that provokes and interrogates the existential dimensions of a modernity awash with mythic, historical and oneiric preconceptions and archetypes. It is poetic as it is intensely philosophical and metalinguistic. A logophile’s poet, Jalal’s language is romantic andlush, abounding with startling juxtapositions and enigmatic semiotics, images of history being forged and cobbled and trampled in a stampede. More than poetry, Oyster Mountain has the texture and breadth of inquiry, of erotic tableaux. It is a sensory spectacle haunted by travels spiritual and physical and tortured illuminations." -Manuel Marrero, Expat Press

"El-Kadali has remarkable skill at creating poetic imagery that evokes immediate, visceral emotion from the reader." -William Duryea

Author: Jalal El-Kadali|
Publisher: Nine-Banded Books
Page Count: 104pp
Size: 6 x 9
Notes: paperback
Date of Publication: October 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-1735643809