
Cassandra Troyan, Throne of Blood, Solar Luxuriance, 2013.
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ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THRONE OF BLOOD
“Cassandra Troyan goes for the throat, and once she's in the throat she goes for the gonads, then the brain. No sex is safe, as is no being. Let her re-teach you how to cower.” - Blake Butler
“Troyan's is a voracious language that gurgles itself, spits back up and swallows again only to become a new hungry hole, always phoenixing, always being born, never finished filling. In her 10000 rebirths we can finally see our own wants clearly: stained, wetdreamt, slit and sticky, but innocent in never having been informed why we are alive. This book is very dirty and very, very pure.” - Melissa Broder
“This book will disturb you to the same degree that you should have been disturbed before you read it. Cassandra Troyan's aphoristic poems reminded me that things are grimmer and life is sadder and filthier than I have will to believe, no matter how often I hear about Jersey Shore. Troyan fills her cup with blood and mucous and says "take, drink." She says, "The body is meat. The meat has feels." Her narratives form a feedback loop with the sound a human brain makes as she squishes it under her boot. She can be as abject as Bataille or as sick as Cèline, but through it all, maybe best of all, she is also funny.” - Adam Robinson
Throne of Blood makes me believe Cassandra Troyan chews razorblades and has freezing skin and needles for fingers, but for some reason, I don’t feel like shying away as she comes closer. Maybe it’s because I sense a sort of hidden warmth she has for her demons. They’re like dozens of hands reaching out that scare you, but don’t mean to.
I wet myself over the thought of roses
of making love to a hospital bed.Declarations of sex to bags
filled with liquids substituting
organs now present as witnesses.Walking into the divide an abyss the possibility
of apathy calculations of sentimentality amiss.Ripped out my vein limbs
overgrown.
Love makes you grow.
Honey drips from a sloe-eyed doe.Get cocooned in the sickness
a sweetening sludge.When the IV tubes get sugar clogged
it is obviously because you are selfish
and I am dead.When weighted I materialize.
Let’s just hover until this distance retreats.
(From “YOU SEDUCE COLORFUL ANIMALS ABOVE THE SKY”)
When I first started reading fiction as a method of learning about writing, I was obsessed with the grotesque, but it feels like Troyan has leveled up the concept here. For roughly a third of the book, I read the speakers as being inhuman simply because they seemed so far removed from humanity that I refused to believe they could be like me (which sounds like a pretty fine accomplishment to me).of making love to a hospital bed.Declarations of sex to bags
filled with liquids substituting
organs now present as witnesses.Walking into the divide an abyss the possibility
of apathy calculations of sentimentality amiss.Ripped out my vein limbs
overgrown.
Love makes you grow.
Honey drips from a sloe-eyed doe.Get cocooned in the sickness
a sweetening sludge.When the IV tubes get sugar clogged
it is obviously because you are selfish
and I am dead.When weighted I materialize.
Let’s just hover until this distance retreats.
(From “YOU SEDUCE COLORFUL ANIMALS ABOVE THE SKY”)
She gets so manic as a child even as a small child who can’t tear herself away from the heat of light into sleep struggles inside with her body damp with fear her gutbrain keeps churning.
“everybody wears just about the same shade of distain rusted by mire a scab a caw like a brokenness born inside a baby. A sickness from the innards she can only be cold. Gutted and raw.”
(“IF YOU LEAVE YOU’LL GO TO THE POUND AND NO ONE IS EVER GONNA WANT YOU EVER AGAIN.”)
Those that are human are twisted with desires to lash out, to be scrubbed clean or wholly disfigured, or to be filled to burst, all in hopes of finding some connection to the real. Sex, one of the only avenues of release available to the people of ToB, is so vital that other icons and symbols of vitality become commingled with it into a form of life slurry that fascinates the speaker.“everybody wears just about the same shade of distain rusted by mire a scab a caw like a brokenness born inside a baby. A sickness from the innards she can only be cold. Gutted and raw.”
(“IF YOU LEAVE YOU’LL GO TO THE POUND AND NO ONE IS EVER GONNA WANT YOU EVER AGAIN.”)
I’m well read but sucked dry. I will grow a thousand thrones before I recede. I will allow small advances before I creep through the slit of your time.
I guess I could grow a fondness for the taste of blood.
My nose it bleeds from lack of use.
Every touch is a wound and the test to smear.
(From “LET’S GET LIFTED”)
The disgusting people of ToB, all wounded in the head but still hard to pity, build their world around you as you read, and eventually force you into their frame of mind, as is the result of the best grotesque literature. The building anxiety becomes more concrete until transforming into a nightmare where any similarities to reality only heighten the terror.I guess I could grow a fondness for the taste of blood.
My nose it bleeds from lack of use.
Every touch is a wound and the test to smear.
(From “LET’S GET LIFTED”)
The architecture of flesh a building
with a building segmented as a scorpion; thickness
as presence rather than protection.
(From “FRAGILE KINGDOM”)
When you have the darkness, you have to play with it in some constructive way or it’ll come out how you don’t want it to. Plenty of this play is in action in ToB as people both fearfully obsess over and fulfill their most primal fantasies. Cassandra, you wild, loving mother to these fucked-up babies, I hope you can bear more, because I could read this forever. - Shaun Gannonwith a building segmented as a scorpion; thickness
as presence rather than protection.
(From “FRAGILE KINGDOM”)
CHICKEN SALAD SANDWICH
CHICKEN SALAD SANDWICH
CHICKEN SALAD SANDWICH
-Throne of Blood
Throne of Blood begins with a Preamble. The Preamble sets the tone for the book, just like the Preamble to the United States Constitution is a brief introductory statement of the Constitution’s fundamental purposes and guiding principles. Presumably, the poem would provide some of those for this book, Throne of Blood.CHICKEN SALAD SANDWICH
CHICKEN SALAD SANDWICH
-Throne of Blood
• “the drained lake muds with the girls of winter bloated and tangled at the bottom in the wreckage”
• “the smell of dead meat.”
• “the scent of rotting bowels”
• “Myafhhhauckingancaeetchesss, arrreuu stheyismines myown FEEUUCKING MEAAT!andTTTthisisfeeuucuuuckibngMINE!”
• “I slammed his head into the concrete floor”
• Edith Piaf
The Preamble begins with lyrical horror. The narrator is unbothered by dead women crowding the drained lake and the house, even when their bodies are used for decoration or masturbation by the male character. The narrator’s point of view changes when it becomes clear that the male character is the one making women into corpses.• “the smell of dead meat.”
• “the scent of rotting bowels”
• “Myafhhhauckingancaeetchesss, arrreuu stheyismines myown FEEUUCKING MEAAT!andTTTthisisfeeuucuuuckibngMINE!”
• “I slammed his head into the concrete floor”
• Edith Piaf
The horror and violence, more specifically, violence against women, casts a long shadow over the rest of the book. Where the Preamble takes on horror in a narrative mode, the rest of the book inverts that formula and approachesit in a more figurative or linguistic or speculative way:
“If there could be a moment of self-realized terror,
where everyone in the world kills his or herself at the same time.”
While, the possibility of horror, fear and dread, are not explicitly present in the rest of the text, the Preamble works as Chekov’s gun, even though (spoiler alert) there isn’t really anything to foreshadow since the remainder of the book is considerably less linear and narrative. Even though the rest isn’t what I would call a story, the poems are still haunted by the dead girls.where everyone in the world kills his or herself at the same time.”
I think the book manages to do a lot of things very successfully, from the disgust, horror, and repulsion of the Preamble, to a candid and intimate lyricism that comes later in poems like Fragile Kingdom. That poem could stand as a synecdoche for the work; it seems like text and the design are hardly holding together, dreadfully balanced, about to collapse. The work is annihilating itself, as are most of the narrators. Narrator is maybe a funny word to use since it seems like the concept of narration is not dismissed, but damaged in the work.
The theatre is a fiction
that I have writ myself true to.
that I have writ myself true to.
There will always linger a quiver as we repeat the affair again, and again. Rise up on our throne of blood call it CORPSE MOUNTAIN built from what intangibles uncertain.
Search for Throne of Blood, and you find a Japanese film based on MacBeth, which makes a lot of sense. It takes an awful lot of corpses to make a book.Actually just look at my face please and let me sit on yr chest.
I’m going to punch you in the dick,
spill water on yr 15” MacBook Pro.
I will need more fidelity. I will not give up.
I will show up at yr apartment
and ring the buzzer and wait
outside even after you let me in
and I will breathe through the building
exhaling into the speaker
our face could never be that close.
Sometimes the blood stops flowing, or maybe it doesn’t. This is from The Castle That Only God Knows. There are multiple distinct tones and voices in the book. While some come from a sort of dream horror world others come from a world with MacBook Pros. Then there are dry lakes full of bodies and head smashing. Then there are poems that are possessed by lyricism. Then there are klonopin poems, lists of side effects, lists of substances consumed.I’m going to punch you in the dick,
spill water on yr 15” MacBook Pro.
I will need more fidelity. I will not give up.
I will show up at yr apartment
and ring the buzzer and wait
outside even after you let me in
and I will breathe through the building
exhaling into the speaker
our face could never be that close.
YOU’RE GONNA BE SO FUCKING HAPPY
You’re in an artist loft in Brooklyn in a room full of people drinking
coffee on a Sunday afternoon and you answer the phone and
start speaking Czech and for a moment you almost forgot what it
means to be dead.
Sometimes the least lyrical moments are the most plaintive:You’re in an artist loft in Brooklyn in a room full of people drinking
coffee on a Sunday afternoon and you answer the phone and
start speaking Czech and for a moment you almost forgot what it
means to be dead.
Please don’t tell anyone I’m crazy.
I couldn’t bear for people to be collectively and overly concerned.
Overall the book is harsh, not gentle. It arrives at a sublime through violence, horror, and decay. It is still interested in the sublime.I couldn’t bear for people to be collectively and overly concerned.
Reigning over the sublimity of one’s impassioned distance.
Throne of Blood is an impassioned distance. It’s not a thing that can be attained or obtained.I’m a true romantic so I need you to hit me.
Negation of this disaster
is the only thing that can save it.
Throne of Blood is an explicitly hard work because the hard thing it is doing is trying to approach the sublime through annihilation of the self. This isn’t always an easy thing to do or read. Where at one point the annihilation of the self would have been through the experience of “Nature” or “God” or “Love” here it is the experience of horror, banality, language, sex, and yes, CHICKEN SALAD SANDWICHES. - Leif HavenNegation of this disaster
is the only thing that can save it.
i'mma sell my guns
By Cassandra Troyan
(Illustrated by Stephen Michael McDowell)
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THE CASTLE THAT ONLY GOD KNOWS
How strange to love a thing like mouthwash.
I would like to gargle your cum.
I want to fuck in the park.
I want to piss on yr chest.
I will smash my clit into yr sternum.
Actually just look at my face please and let me sit on yr chest.
I’m going to punch you in the dick,
spill water on yr 15” MacBook Pro.
I will need more fidelity. I will not give up.
I will show up at yr apartment
and ring the buzzer and wait
outside even after you let me in
and I will breathe through the building
exhaling into the speaker
our face could never be that close.
Go to the bathroom with me.
Come in my mouth in my esophagus
impossible
repetitive sexy failures.
It’s so easy to feel that adulthood
is closing in on something
rather than opening up.
The wants of our bodies to all meld together
this one doesn’t like a hip touch
another one no hair tug
because his father used to pull
him by his hair
but you are the only person
who has hurt me how I wanted
and then more than I wanted
until I wanted more.
IMMA SELL MY GUNS AND THEN TAKE YOU TO VEGAS
I dreamt of being with you in bed
but I couldn’t see the bed.
Every time I closed my eyes to try to see,
I was bombarded with an image of a flower
exploding again and again
shivering its path into my vision.
A hatchet forced into the ground
becoming a flag.
I will destroy myself so I won’t need to kill.
To have the strength to stand for your own selfish hate.
To run against a stream of something like disaster.
Look at me, I have a body
and it moves in space
for when the heart gets blunted
head is foggy.
I want to be in a way of thinking that is only feeling.
There is never a time when anything doesn’t matter.
Nothing is inevitable.
Even a wound is a child.
What do you fear?
No tears for the creatures of the night.
They rest in gold milk.
It’s melancholy at golden hour and all we have room for is
Black Bile
Black Bile
Black Bile
It catches your lungs then your wrist like a shackle
as all I really want is for a peacock to stand on my chest.
Is that really too much to ask?
I don’t want children
I just want to be your mother.
I want to hold a rock in my mouth
and offer it you as an egg.
To put grapes in your mouth
and drool through the fruit.
To feel contented by the idea of not thinking, not just
not thinking in the syrup of a want.
I really believe in absolutely nothing except everything
as it’s easy to be afraid of something true.
(Illustrated by Stephen Michael McDowell)

THE CASTLE THAT ONLY GOD KNOWS
How strange to love a thing like mouthwash.
I would like to gargle your cum.
I want to fuck in the park.
I want to piss on yr chest.
I will smash my clit into yr sternum.
Actually just look at my face please and let me sit on yr chest.
I’m going to punch you in the dick,
spill water on yr 15” MacBook Pro.
I will need more fidelity. I will not give up.
I will show up at yr apartment
and ring the buzzer and wait
outside even after you let me in
and I will breathe through the building
exhaling into the speaker
our face could never be that close.
Go to the bathroom with me.
Come in my mouth in my esophagus
impossible
repetitive sexy failures.
It’s so easy to feel that adulthood
is closing in on something
rather than opening up.
The wants of our bodies to all meld together
this one doesn’t like a hip touch
another one no hair tug
because his father used to pull
him by his hair
but you are the only person
who has hurt me how I wanted
and then more than I wanted
until I wanted more.
IMMA SELL MY GUNS AND THEN TAKE YOU TO VEGAS
I dreamt of being with you in bed
but I couldn’t see the bed.
Every time I closed my eyes to try to see,
I was bombarded with an image of a flower
exploding again and again
shivering its path into my vision.
A hatchet forced into the ground
becoming a flag.
I will destroy myself so I won’t need to kill.
To have the strength to stand for your own selfish hate.
To run against a stream of something like disaster.
Look at me, I have a body
and it moves in space
for when the heart gets blunted
head is foggy.
I want to be in a way of thinking that is only feeling.
There is never a time when anything doesn’t matter.
Nothing is inevitable.
Even a wound is a child.
What do you fear?
No tears for the creatures of the night.
They rest in gold milk.
It’s melancholy at golden hour and all we have room for is
Black Bile
Black Bile
Black Bile
It catches your lungs then your wrist like a shackle
as all I really want is for a peacock to stand on my chest.
Is that really too much to ask?
I don’t want children
I just want to be your mother.
I want to hold a rock in my mouth
and offer it you as an egg.
To put grapes in your mouth
and drool through the fruit.
To feel contented by the idea of not thinking, not just
not thinking in the syrup of a want.
I really believe in absolutely nothing except everything
as it’s easy to be afraid of something true.
How To Become Invisible
Looking out the rear car window, my head tilted back, the sky reminds me of a disappointment that I’ve seen before.
Being here makes me think of what it would be like to be very quiet and slowly pick out my eyes.
I would be willing to do it if it makes you stop talking.
If I never have to see you or anyone ever again.
To the right, there is giant riding lawnmower driving into the distance and disappearing over the hill into a cemetery.
In the morning my mother tries to wake me.
Instead she crawls onto my inflatable air mattress with me in the basement and I can’t remember the last time something felt so real.
I can never return I can never leave
If there could be a moment of self-realized terror, where everyone in the world kills his or herself at the same time.
Moving in the language of blood.
What it means to know how one can feel a sick dig of the helpless into one’s skin.
When you didn’t know the war is over.
When you feel like another one has just begun. There is a long hunger to not die in the ways that we want to. To experience the accident of loss.
The impossibility in knowing that any life you choose is absurd.
The insatiable has product the glitch is proscribed and this fucking entitlement like a line slant, the lever cancel and I can see that what you really want to make is pasta.
To be a real person is not to be alive.
There is distance in a hope for tranquility, to know that if you pull long enough you can become your own enemy.
I feel every method of attraction is only there because there is no other option.
I will teach you to hurt yourself.
You have a blood with wants.
I BOUGHT MYSELF A SHOTGUN FOR MY 25TH BIRTHDAY.
I bought myself a shotgun for my 25TH birthday.
That’s better than something else.
It’s the joke that isn’t funny until you cry, when you smear wet and needy on the dirty fringed rug.
When you laugh you knock the cum plug out of life.
Keys strike each other like a gangbang and on the high chord I notice how everything is unimaginable.
ce sentiment, sentiment ce sentiment de l'amour
The impossibility of knowing someone in a time where they don’t exist.
Its always hardest to lift one’s self from the ground.
If we fuck, let’s end in a position that is good to die in.
