Kharlamov's Ankle

In this anarchic, post-genre poem-as-novel, imagined by one of Canada's leading experimental writers, the dystopian politics of our everyday inhale both a contra tenor opera singer who lured to China by the Kanadian embassy and the innocent cultural attaché who invited him. kHarLaMoV's aNkLe: a utopian fantasy leaks us bits of poetry and counsel, while in its bowels the rumble of utopia rises. It is the unrelenting spasmodic energy of a group of revolutionary junkies of Montreal known as kHarLaMoV's aNkLe, who work to free not just themselves, but us all. The characters of kHarLaMoV's aNkLe are never singular. They are communities of agitated endeavor, alive (we won't call it "living") in a dystopia so all-encompassing that even the conditions and conventions of punctuation and capitalization are shattered. This fascinating novel invokes Kathy Acker, and Roberto Bolaño, too; the kinetics of David Foster Wallace; and the sentence-long novels of José Saramago. But the ANkle goes further, as it doesn't just use but survives grammatical convention, wresting words back from the death doctors of order, and making them, and us, believe in the world again.