Advance praise for Kim Gek Lin Short’s The Bugging Watch

"A strange romance of 'the secret motions of things' (Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis, 1627), Kim Gek Lin Short’s The Bugging Watch and Other Exhibits is an exciting, mysterious, sometimes macabre new narrative. Her zany futuristic gothic opera of prose poems is threaded with magic, potions, passion, a “concert of hair,” a “hazmat of holes.” With its incantations of quantum teleology, its footnotes & sources, it is a magnificent work. Irresistible!" —Norma Cole

"Kim Gek Lin Short's first full-length collection is a luminous and perverse fairy-tale to be read at the beginning of the day, preferably in that "chilly blue hour before 4 a.m." Complete with footnotes, diagrams and an "unspeakable private crevice," these prose "exhibits" display a prebiotic potential. What was "not quite alive," becomes, in this swift, dark telling, "hot anyway," "enchantment created inside everything," and sometimes: "a poem about bugs." Angels, lab technicians from the suburbs of Denver, men in ratty satin capes and artisans of all kinds populate this stunning and strange narrative, which is not a narrative: it is a "growing hole." Enacting the desire and curiosity the book prompts, a reader might peer in, fall for a long time, then "miraculously return." I repeat: do not read this book at night. Don't fall asleep. If you do, I can't--the book can't--account for your new dreams. "— Bhanu Kapil

"This small unsettling book first proposes a stiflingly sweet symbiosis between two shut-in innamorati, and then lets its queer world subdivide in a theater of exfoliating roles. Most shocking in this miniature is the Rosebud at its center, a muse who breaks with her mate only to reinvent him out of bugs, ink and sugarwater.  Like a Victorian photo collage mounting, say, the head of Prince Albert on a croquet mallet or umbrella handle, this seemingly innocuous work both conceals and reveals its morbidity, its twisted thirsts." —Joyelle McSweeney

"I kept thinking: Catacomb Valentine. Sometimes we forget that ancient catacombs were mapped, negotiated--which is to say: read--by the placement of the graves of paupers. The tunnel diggers constellated this grammar so they would know how to navigate and create within lush darkness. The Bugging Watch and Other Exhibits, in its way, deeply reminds. The network of tunnels--between lives, between being (blink) and not being (blink)--and all so papered with valentines, the sort cut from thick, mealy colored childhood stock. Here is language as enchantment."—Selah Saterstrom