K Hank Jost's charybdic anti-epic, MadStone, glitters with the strewn gore of every eviscerated day, the innards and excretions of both body and mind, unwinding a nauseous fugue of hungover prophecy, macerated identity, and the collapse of all distance between selves.
Far from pornographizing misery, MadStone nullifies it. Here, catastrophe is synonymous with the mundane. With a near-biblical swagger and inscrutability, MadStone unravels the ruination of six lives in a contrapuntal plea against self-obsession, incuriosity, and the spectacle of disaster. As equally erudite as it is vehemently anti-academic, MadStone poses, once again, the unanswerable question of modernity: How, after all of this, are we meant to go on living?