Writing the Wound: The Production of the Real in S.M.H.’s CICATRIZATION

I’m proud to have worked on this piece with writer Leonard Klossner and editor David Kuhnlein for The Quarterless Review. It’s not easy to convince folks to run a book review of a book with this much graphic violence.

With all of this said, we may finally ask: What does Cicatrization steal? What does it take? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Instead, the text is intensely, obsessively, and violently productive. Because a wound (upon the flesh or upon the psyche) produces a radical change upon and beneath the site of its surface. Because to murder is to produce a corpse. The gouge, the slit, the cut, then, are dignified as artistic gestures like the brush of bristles across a canvas that, on their own or in series, all serve to create. The canvas wears what strokes cover its once unblemished flesh like contusions. Because the painted canvas itself becomes a wound. And in this same way, through this subtraction of flesh and this spilling of substance, Cicatrization produces, creates, and brings to life, over and again, this real death.