Radioapocrypha
-
- €14.99
-
- €14.99
Publisher Description
A novella in verse, Radioapocrypha envisions what would have happened if Jesus Christ had arrived for the first time not in Palestine two thousand years ago but in a subdivision in Maryland in 1989, the year Depeche Mode released “Personal Jesus.” In this suburban retelling of the gospel, Jesus is a hunky post-punk high school chemistry teacher and the disciples are a twelve-member garage band. The story unfolds as recorded testimony and overheard teachings, a series of alternating lyric poems, prose poems, and parables that engage the social, sexual, and racial tensions of an era. Told from the point of view of the Magdalen character, named Maren—and drawing from the Gnostic text known as the Gospel of Mary as well as other scriptural sources—these poems sample widely from popular music and 1980s culture to recast and revivify a gritty, surreal, crackpot story of loners, losers, and lovers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fischer (St. Rage's Vault) remixes Scripture with 1980s nostalgia in a smart novella-in-verse that impressively balances high- and low-brow elements. The gestures towards the gospels start off small, with Fischer choosing to worldbuild in such cheekily titled poems as "Our Lady of the Subdivision" and "Parable of the Cheerleader." This 1980s suburban landscape features bored high schoolers who shoplift and keep piercing guns in their cars. The collection's protagonist is Maren, a Mary Magdalene figure looking back at her teen years through the lens of adulthood: "I was Keds, leggings, over-sized cable knits,/ Big Hair up-bangs." Maren makes for a perceptive witness and chronicler in the poems she narrates. The others are rapid-fire monologues dished out by Callahan, a 33-year-old teacher, and Jesus figure to a garage band of teen boys. Callahan is both "a lover and a healer" and "a real son of a bitch," including in his sexual relationship with Maren. Fischer handles the inherent power imbalance of this dynamic with wit, grace, and a complex yearning: "Each year my faith decays by half, then half again./ In this way it is infinite." Swapping the crucifixion for a ghastly car crash, Fischer produces a work as smart, satisfying, and nuanced in its climax as it is as a whole.
