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Review of

Surrealia, 2024, Miguel O. Mitchell, Gnashing Teeth Publishing, 242 East Main Street, Norman AR 71960, ISBN 979-8-9898345-0-1, 59 p.

Imagine a world in which all is surreal, a place where a visitor from reality would be ill-equipped to function. Where the familiar forms and terminology bubble with new meanings. On Surralia, every thing, every being, every event, is surreal. Language attempts to explain this with the quanta of words.

From “The Return of the Physicist”

his body particulated
a disintegrating sand castle
“godhood is relaxing”
the fleeting dust mouth muttered

he no longer belonged to the queen

This book is made up of two kinds of poems. Some are snapshots of different parts of Surralia, as observed by a visitor, as in the example excerpted above. Other poems tell stories in verse. The two stories, Museum Tour and Max's Journey, are very different. The first explores the universe in which Surralia exists. This is a fantastic and bewildering milieu, for the most bewildering planet of them all. The second tale concerns the struggle between good and evil, a conflict that stretches across 400 worlds. In Surralia, hope and freedom are not just words, but play out again and again, across the multiverse. The planet Surralia is a home to the surreal, but is also a sentient being itself, and one pregnant with power.

Mitchell has told in verse the old story of resistance against oppression. It's an old story, because it crops up again and again in the real world. Some of the poems in the book are more surreal than others; many don't achieve the lunacy of the one quoted above. However, the collection as a whole is a beautiful and surreal landscape of, perhaps, our own future.