Saint James

Ivan Arguelles &
Jack Foley

Ivan Arguelles is the singlehanded savior of modern American surrealism. Jack Foley is one of his longtime friends. The two of them struck up a rather odd email thread in 1998, and the chapbook *Saint James* is the result.

(...and I lost the rest of this review to a computer crash, so it will be much shorter than it originally was.)

If you're already an established Ivan Arguelles fan, by all means pick this up. It's got all the usual hallmarks of Arguelles' work, but they're not as finely-honed as they are in most of his books. This could be just the fact that he's only got slightly over half of a less-than-forty-page book with which to work, but Arguelles is excellent at obsessing grandly in very small amounts of space; the language here is simply looser, easier, as one would expect from email. It gives great insight into what the man thinks about before whipping it all into poetry. Foley's work, which I have not encountered previous to this book, is definitely enough to warrant my looking for more of his stuff. Brash, exuberant, a great straight man for Arguelles.

If you're new to Arguelles, however, start with some of the more recent (and thus more findable) books in the Pantograph cycle; Hapax Legomenon and That Goddess are both wonderful.