Publisher's Synopsis
Schism Press presents:
The fresh, previously unheard notes in Ben Segal's brain-feverish surrealism arrive in the reader's mind with an audaciously hypercompact lyricism, and his sentences dart straight to the heart. Pool Party Trap Loop's expertly miniaturized fictions of bodily havoc, of messily human collision, introduce Ben Segal as a vital and original voice.- Garielle Lutz Suppose every fable is tired. One's been the child painter for years. Another the Worm King for every dream. Over there is the girl who can't drown. Down in the vacuum are the people living by cards. Up on the Ferris wheel is the wrestler in a red signet that matches his beard. In the end it's all another legacy, another trial, a true life. In this mischievously enchanting collection, Ben Segal knows that tinsel rusts, and that's when things get real-hearted. A clear-colored sadness leaks from real bodies and philosophies. The ghosts are here, but they live in buckets. The squirrels are dead, but they live in jackets. What they all sing for is to be at peace, and Ben Segal gets it all on spools of fugue.
- Mike Young Pool Party Trap Loop is a collection of captivating stories sheathed in grammatical glitz. In each of these narrative nuggets Segal exploits form and conceit while simultaneously tightrope walking the excitingly dangerous arena of the artful sentence.... Segal's work stands alone in its strange, winding, sudden candor. Pool Party Trap Loop is a collection for the intellectually adventurous and the unafraid. The sentence level beauty and large-scale conceit ingenuity make it a serious read that requires, between stories, even more serious pause. Reading Pool Party Trap Loop is wounding to the memory - it's a collection that will pull you in, swirl you around, and spit you out mangled and changed.
- Rita Bullwinkle, Full Stop Magazine The stories that Segal writes reflect each other, sometimes in mirrored pairs. But where palindromes create an illusion of order by deforming words, Segal assembles elegant words to evoke a fucked up reality. More than anything, Ben Segal reminds me of a young Raymond Queneau. Except he's not French. And he's alive.
- Michael Vegas Mussman, Pank Magazine Pool Party Trap Loop is a palindrome and a nightmare. ... I, a mere outsider looking in, would classify this as a book that is far more about traps and loops than pools or parties. Perhaps pools and parties enter the equation from time to time, but this is a book devoted to the lure, to the art of ensnarement, with body horror its most frequent loop....[Segal] has created a dazzling world.
- Carolyn DeCarlo, Heavy Feather Review If the stories in Pool Party Trap Loop are a full-frontal attack - which I believe they are - the attack is not on the reader, but rather on the larger constructs that affect the way we fuck and think and speak. Its purpose is to remind us that language, sex, violence, and even issues of conduct are inescapable and intractable, the only thing worth acknowledging, deserving of both our respect and contempt. If surrealism seems to suggest freedom and liberation, Ben's work conversely demonstrates a series of structures - ethical, societal, linguistic - crashing into each other in ways that may be shocking, but make complete and absolute sense when set against the lattice of rules that govern and fragment our daily lives.
- Keith McCleary, Electric Literature
