Theater of Parts by M. Mack Released

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Sundress Publications is pleased to announce the release of M. Mack’s debut full-length collection, Theater of Parts. This book investigates dramatic forms through impossible theater and the impossible body.

“M. Mack’s Theater of Parts is a cacophonous incision on the impossible body –– a book of noses and nipples, of scars and wigs and wings. It’s bound in mesh and written in the politics of language and the language of tongues and the tongues of characters acting out the transformation of being. It is the spectacle of family and the drama of strangers, of impressions and pronouns and what it means to be ‘carving out a space for myself, inside myself.’ I finished the book and immediately read it again; Mack’s words are sharp, probing, and utterly unparalleled. Exeunt all.” -Sonya Vatomsky

“In Theater of Parts, M. Mack embraces the absurdist theater of gender and naming, of body parts and bodies partial, in a series of dramas that cannot be staged but must be lived. As the house lights come up, we meet Milquetoast (‘What toast?’), a melancholy cross-dressing cockroach (‘Cross-dressing from what? How do you sex a cockroach?’). Transmogrified from 1920s comic strips and Beat poet resurrections, Milquetoast is only the first in a dazzle of proliferating characters—The Poet; The Actor, mutilated into The Poet’s dialogic Other; a gaggle of Tits, who may be a chorus line, may be doorstops to the public restrooms, their Nipples sometimes like little hats, sometimes like microphones; and of course The Audience, rarely sure what is visible or how to look. With precision of wording and economy of gesture, and the impassive tone of a stage manager supervising a deconstructed circus, M. Mack unfolds the acts and actions, the not-acts, the scenes, and the spectacles that together make up the de/re/gendering and regeneration of bodies. ‘We will need to use our collective body as a wide net,’ the poet writes. ‘This is all or nothing.'”
-Susan Tichy, author of Trafficke and Gallowglass

Mack and Milquetoast

M. Mack is a genderqueer poet, editor, and fiber artist in Virginia. Ze is also the author of the chapbooks Mine (Big Lucks Books, 2016), Traveling (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2015) and Imaginary Kansas (dancing girl press, 2015). Mack is a founding co-editor of Gazing Grain Press and an assistant editor for Cider Press Review.

Theater of Parts is available for order now at the Sundress Publications Store!