Mark Russell's Come to the River is set over the weekend of an academic conference in a hotel in a city very much like Glasgow. In this collection of prose poems, Russell's characters suffer disorientation and subject others to clumsy and eccentric social interactions. They stumble and bully their way through the chaos of identity, and wrestle with the peculiar nature of academia.
The narrative follows a capricious academic over the course of three days as he tries to deliver a paper, never entirely certain who he is, where he is, what his paper proposes, or even if he has written a paper in the first place. Come to the River's characters are ambivalent to others' pain and discomfort, shameless with the truth, and habitually unreliable.
Come to the River explores how people cope when the comfortable and predictable lives they appear to be living turn alien and incomprehensible.
Praise for the author and work:
"Mark Russell's Come to the River is a collection of prose-poems which follows a continuous narrative, centred around the polite depravity of an academic conference. Come to the River successfully ties together elements of poetry, drama and fiction, creating a unique and often compelling collection with hints of innovative dramatists like Beckett, Chekhov and Miller alongside contemporary surrealist poets like Selima Hill and Vahni Capildeo. Russell's prose-poems are lucid, wry and affable. Essential reading."
- Charlie Baylism, Editor, Anthropocene, Broken Sleep Books, Poet, Drag City
"The narrator keeps changing name tags (Jolene is maybe my favourite) as we weave in and out of various stories at a convention of conferences at a hotel. A paper on The New Jersey Crumb Coffee Cake, the River Clyde "with the Squinty Bridge in the foreground," a riverboat casino turned Museum of The American Civil War, a group of sociologists hoping to sing Dolly Parton hits. In the spirit of James Tate and Donald Barthelme, these surreal-absurd tales are full of wonder, wit, & delight. Come to the River is rooms within rooms. A welcoming wild ride."
- Marcus Slease, Author Puppy, Never Mind the Beasts, The Green Monk
"Come to the River offers a series of mini dramas where a dislocated and disorientated narrative self continually challenges and is challenged by conventional thinking and perception. Set at an academic conference, each drama probes the impact of socially conditioned responses to various situations with comic and diverting endings. This thought-provoking collection is a comedic tour de force, where absurdity, a troubled fluidity and alternative realities become the norm to demonstrate the follies of conditioned behaviour and thinking. Mark Russell's fresh and divergent poetry simultaneously makes you smile and think. This is a comedy of errors with a punch and punch bowl at its heart."
- David Caddy, Poet, Writer, Critic, Editor, Tears in the Fence
