Edinburgh,
by Alexander Chee

by Jack Xamis

Edinburgh, a Novel. Alexander Chee.
Welcome Rain Publishers. 212 pp. 2001.

If you want to understand why poets shouldn’t write novels, read Edinburgh, by Alexander Chee.

If you want to understand why poets, in societies which cease to value the truth that can come through poetry, are forced to write novels, read Edinburgh, by Alexander Chee.

If you want to see what happens when such societies lock their poets away in the gulag of academia, read Edinburgh, by Alexander Chee.

If you want to see what happens to the crags of poetic truth in the dim half-light of beautiful, limping and wounded prose, read Edinburgh, by Alexander Chee.

If you want to see what happens even to prose in a society determined to put only a monetary value on self-interest, read Edinburgh, by Alexander Chee and wince at the repeated unedited lapses of grammar.

If you want to see how even the most remote yet estimable lapidarist’s shop cannot escape the ravages of the capitalist bull, read Edinburgh, by Alexander Chee.

If you want to hear the Medusa glance of your television cataract eyes grind such shimmering shards of beauty as remain among the barbarians to the dull gray dust of lust, read Edinburgh, by Alexander Chee.

If you want to see how even cracked mirrors still show enough of our monster faces for palsied, fleeting recognition, read Edinburgh, by Alexander Chee.

For, unlike Bacon who tricked us into believing he was painting only the other, Chee tricks us through his intricately wrought Korean-American puzzle of gendered ages into seeing ourselves, and worst of all, that those selves from beginning to end have nothing, nothing, nothing to do with age or gender or culture, but only, always with love.