Flowers Blooming Fire

Christopher Owens 🔖 “Write as if you’re dead”.

This advice, offered to U2 frontman Bono by Irish poet Brendan Kennelly, is one that Alexander Kattke has taken to heart when writing this, his new book (and his first since 2022’s excellent RedBlackInfinite.

Billed as a work of pain and rebirth, here’s how it starts:

I am at the edge of a mountaintop of so many sacrifices. My free hand is being clasped by a woman in white urging me to hold on. Beyond the distance is an impenetrable miasma obscuring the path beyond the cliff’s edge. My body goes slack as I look down at the fall below me and I willingly choose to let go of that helping hand.

From this moment, the reader is whisked along a variety of hellish landscapes where the narrator contemplates nature, humanity, violence, school, childhood, isolation and the idea of a saviour. All of which are bookended with quotes (some real, some fictitious, some pseudo-inspirational) which not only demonstrate the absurdity and intellectual banality of using quotes as a philosophy (similar to RedBlackInfiite) but also how “motivational” quotes are merely self-aggrandising advertising in the wrong set of circumstances.

In certain ways, I’m reminded of Kathy Acker when reading this book. The harsh, mechanised imagery of systemic rape and violence depicted here is similar to her own work in books like Great Expectations. Take this segment as an example:

Off in a dark recess is a limbless man, stripped and beaten, his abusers have instructed him to sing and a microphone has been lowered to his battered chin where the howl he emits comes out as a beautiful sound resembling a dying whale. That noise will become a siren’s call luring others to explore those dark and neglected corners.

Bizarre, humiliating, brutal and unforgiving.

Much like RedBlackInfinite, this is a heavy and intense work that certainly won’t be for everyone. But for those who want to explore a desolate afterlife where the sins of the world are inflicted upon the multitudes, you’ll be able to feel like you’re dead and, running to 40 pages, it doesn’t outstay its welcome.

Does what it sets out to do with aplomb.

Alexander Kattke, 2024, Flowers Blooming Fire. Independently published. ISBN-13: 978-1304663979.

⏩ Christopher Owens was a reviewer for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland. He is currently the TPQ Friday columnist and is the author of A Vortex of Securocrats and “dethrone god”.