The Book of Hieroglyphs ART

The Book of Hieroglyphs
by David Thomas

Published by Ubu Projex/Hearpen, 268 pages.
Hardback with dust jacket, 6"x9", ISBN 978-1-4716-6164-8. Limited edition released May 31 2012. Sold out.

Paperback, 6"x9", ISBN 978-1-4717-2820-4.
Published September 2012.


Release Notes

'The Book of Hieroglyphs' is rock and roll. It does not present stories of drug fuelled debauchery. It is without amusing anecdotes of life on the road. There are no details of the deeply engrossing lives of rock musicians. It is the essence.

David Thomas presents a journey through the ghost towns of America. Along county roads, across lost bridges, on the banks of mighty Interstate rivers are places that you don't know that you know. There's not a map in the world to tell you where to find them. This is a story of the quest, a story of lives sighted. A Lincoln Continental Town Car races across the face of a neon land, trailing clouds of dust and dogs. The story goes Somewhere and ends Nowhere. It represents a different kind of writing; a form that went into a state of metamorphosis before the time of Homer, emerging from its chrysalis in 1877 as a new creation. A hundred years of maturation followed. The writing is become hieroglyphic.

David Thomas writes according to the unique narrative architecture that has evolved over the century since Edison invented the phonograph/microphone, and over the decades since Ike Turner recorded 'Rocket 88' in 1951.

This is a poetry book that doesn't look like a poetry book. It's a novel that doesn't look like a novel. It's a story that doesn't look like a story. It's a film that doesn't look like a film. It's a song that doesn't sound out loud.

Rock and roll makes you pay attention. It reveals ghosts. It reveals ghost towns.

Reaction

Van Dyke Parks
"I have trod and will retread this confirming and inquiring work time and again. It's strangely home. Epic in scope. As mighty on the page as on the stage, with scat and logic, this MacDuff leads us on."

J.C. Menu, French publisher, L' Association
"This book is not a book, it's an alien."

Bob Holman, Bowery Poetry Club
"Thomas refuses to call the pieces in this book poetry, says they are not the songs. I really don't care what you call them, and it's true that they are unlike anything you've ever read before, but what they are are zings, stings, word bullets that tell stories so condensed that your mind changes on every syllable."