Provincial Squirming
by Hugh Blanton
Readers, critics, and editors scream for something different. ‘Literature has gone to hell! Give me something I haven’t seen before!’ they wail. More and more the submission guidelines for literary magazines today have the category ‘hybrid’ along with the standard poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. This results in some odd pieces appearing, some of which I question are really ‘hybrid.’ Jai Knight has taken up the gauntlet of writing something readers have never seen before. ‘You want to mix poetry, fiction, and nonfiction?’ he seems to be saying. ‘How about all that and some magical realism? Some screenplay maybe? Hey, what about extraterrestrial language? UNTRANSLATED!’ Here’s a collection of stories—or something—that goes well beyond the different.
Provincial Squinting at the Mercury Orgy is an unclassifiable collection of 37 pieces by Jai Knight. The prose and poetry found here dazzles, bewilders, and provokes. Readers who caught the two new Penguin releases My First Book by Honor Levy and Brat by Gabriel Smith will recognize the high velocity Zoomeresque writing in Provincial—and then be surprised to find out that Knight is forty-eight. The stories here do not follow an overall narrative arc, but that doesn’t stop some of the characters from reappearing in other stories. Professor Belinda R. Gmeiner first appears in the story ‘A Modern Romance’ conducting a Bod-Pod experiment where she shrinks herself down to the size of a single cell and enters her subject’s body. She reappears later in a piece ‘Melt Down,’ a hybrid modernist poem/detective story—the detective, Eagle Beak, having appeared previously in another piece unrelated to our professor. Like any good modernist, Knight hides his rhymes and makes them subtle:
something elemental oh my goodness holy crap suck ass
psychotropic drugs smashed many a glass ceiling energy portals
antsy suck balls
whacked out of your skull popped a rod and sprayed out
lackadaisical throw me a bone wet his beak tanked out of pocket
love on her striking range
consistency is key
gumption adrenaline dump swerve that smash your targets 20
large legit yolked
the small 15 kaput super stoked big wig fire therapy
Ass, glass, beak, key, yolked, stoked—subtle, in-line and end rhyming/slant rhyming. Knight is obviously not afraid to play with form.
We spend a lot of time on space ships in Provincial. One character, Noble (sometimes Nobel) is part space explorer, part con man. ‘As I live and breathe, I swear my forces love me because I break their balls. I rule ’em with a silent iron fist babe.’ However, he gets hauled back to earth to face punishment, but defiantly begins a charity scam. His followers remain loyal, but then after more defeats are forced to retreat and hide. His girlfriend Catnonia confronts him at the ghetto he’d taken over, complete with statues of himself carved by his slaves: ‘Still he tried to plead/worm out. Welling up. ‘How could you?” he pleads, wondering if this is the end. ”Do it,’ Mermaidox said seethed.’
There’s a story here that is a single four-hundred-thirty-seven word sentence, another that’s a single six word sentence. In another story we get this line: ‘I stare up as the saints pass over my head.’ The name of that story? ‘Taints of the Saints.’ He wears his influence of Burroughs, John Barth, and Joe Orton plainly on his sleeve, but reading Provincial is like living in a John Ashberry poem where Ashberry had OD’d on psilocybin. Knight’s effort at strangeness falls flat, however, with ‘Lifestyle’; it’s simply the word ‘and’ repeated ninety times and does nothing to enhance the collection.
I was sure I was about to read a Moby-Dick knockoff when I came upon the story ‘Boat Crew’ that opened up with ‘Call me Acorn.’ Hardly. It was about a band that had landed a gig on a cruise ship. Their performance goes slightly wrong:
It was
as if we were performing our popular The Tears of a Clown Routine
in front of the captain, chaplain and VIP passengers that a butt
plug squirmed out.
A rabbit out of a hat.
Knight gets an ‘A’ for enjambment choice here.
Knight is taking the torch from the sixties Beats with their sexuality and off-beat prose/poetry styles and spraying it with gasoline and sprinting naked through a carnival funhouse screaming maniacally:
The babies were operated on one month after birth- Corrective surgery binding the legs
together then flesh molded into a fish tail. Lobotomy trig implants, genetic enhancers and
flesh tubes attachments, front end urine and poop service. Lastly, the addition of a siren song
voice box. This was the Standard 1 model.
He even includes a story here from the era—a platoon of American soldiers in Vietnam loot a charm, or a talisman, ‘a horned and evilly smiling figurine. Golden with ruby red eyes and studded with beautiful jewels.’ Odd things start happening to the platoon. One soldier, Nathan, ‘has never paid any attention at all to Don’s athletic build before.’ Nathan undoes his shirt and then, ‘his right hand creep crawled toward a chubbing penis.’ Yes, the platoon gets weirder and more horrifying. Next time you hear someone say they are tired of the same old stuff and want to read something different, point them to Jai Knight.
Provincial Squinting at the Mercury Orgy
by Jai Knight, 177 pages
Anxiety Press, $16.00
THE END
ABOUT THE CRITIC
Hugh Blanton‘s latest book is Kentucky Outlaw. He can be reached on X @HughBlanton5.
YOU MAY ALSO LIKE…
The Third Obituary of Hiram C. Young by Marsden Lyonwahl
Bob Haiku by Meg Pokrass
The Laughingstock of the Death-Collectors’ Convention by Christie Chapman
THE 2026 FIFA WORLD CUP: WHERE IT IS BEING PLAYED, HOW TO AVOID IT
The Best Dollar He’d Ever Spent by Pablo Libedinsky
Leave a Reply