Welcome to the strange world of Richard Gessner where words and images matter. Gessner provides the reader with fresh images, use of words and stories that may or may not be about what they appear to be. Surreal? Maybe. Or they may just be reality in disguise. The Zoo-Bray is located in the basement of a library. Those kept in the basement, (dark?), are writers of every kind. Parking-ticket scribblers face classical versifiers—Subpoena makers face street poets to produce spontaneous legal writs–… The forgotten face the immortal–. All of them are kept under the watchful eye of the zoo-breeder who wanders through the maze of hallways listening to the congress of burgeoning tete-a-tetes caught up in an infectious meld of snowballing ideas. He tells us at the center is an incubator where the pairs of the most promising writers chosen by the zoo-breeder are placed to mate and give birth. Gessner tells us the zoo-breeder decides what books make it to the upper shelves and what ones do not. Now the story could be viewed a surreal or a thinly masked critique of cookie cutter MFA programs. Gessner gives us a wide ranging group of stories such as Excerpts From the Diary of a Neanderthal Dilettante. The Conduit a tale of a man stabbed in the heart seeking refuge in a pipe: Moving down the windy concrete tunnel, listening for his arteries drain, he leaves a red carpet for the assailant’s knife. Millennial scorpion stinging itself drowning in cesspools of regeneration. Hug, wide, longer than all seeing memory. The pipe sparkles with light, twinkling with blood hitting the cold air. The strangeness of the travel of the man in the pipe with dance callers, ancestors, wedding rings looping, ego dust and random chaos. Weird images carefully crafted by a writer who has earned his chops. He gives us hermits, a unicyclist, arbitrators, a man in a couch and so much more wrapped in unnatural situations. Gessner looks at the world through distorted glasses and yet as the reader moves through this work all comes into view. Such as in this flash fiction piece, The Pelican’s Tonsils: A psychiatrist stands in the ocean, wearing his patient’s galoshes, waiting for barnacles to adhere to them. His framed doctor’s degree has escaped from his office wall and taken up residence inside the pouch of a pelican sitting on a far off rock jutting from the ocean. In the stark wetness of the pouch, the lettering from the degree wears off getting stuck to the pelican’s tonsils. When the pelican dives for fish its tonsils wiggle, rearranging the lettering from the doctors degree. In order to restore his official identity and career, the psychiatrist affects a man of action stance, preparing to swim out into the ocean and give the pelican a tonsillectomy—but the barnacles clustering on his patient’s galoshes keep him anchored to the shore as he attempts to swim—the crustaceous ball and chain keeping him forever split! Gessner is a master of imagery, metaphor, of the unnatural setting and has produced a fantastic collection of bizarre stories that are equally disturbing and fantastic. I was to discover that Gessners head is a sort of cavern piled high with such wonders original images, fresh metaphors, mind-stretching scenarios, and alternate world orders. A sampling of the narrative set-ups in The Conduit and Other Visionary Tales of Morphing Whimsy hints at what the reader is in for: A war criminal takes refuge in the hollow of a tree and accretes a helmet of bird droppings; the authors of books housed in a multi-storied library are imprisoned in its basement and cross-bred to produce hybrid literary forms; platypus eggs multiply in the scrotum of a unicyclist: Shining through the scrotal sac, twinkling in stars far and near, swarms of bluish eggs bulge over the saddle of the nomad s unicycle, making pedaling most difficult. --Vincent Czyz On The Conduit: I like the way you have gradually added layer upon layer of detail-Grandma s maple syrup, ancestors, country dance steps, various animals to make a densely swirled piece of fiction. Reminiscent of William Burroughs. My favorite line was: Poop chute somersault sleep ventricle snow do-si-do --Allen Ashley, author of The Planet Suite British Fantasy Society Award Winner Many readers shy away from the avant-garde, finding it inaccessible, confusing, absurd, arbitrary to the point of meaningless. I myself have these issues with Andre Breton s prose experiments, Antonin Artaud s surrealist poetry, John Ashberys later work, many of the stories in Yoko Tawada s Where Europe Begins, and a dozen other contemporary books that defeated my attempts to engage with them. Gessner s writing is not of that ilk. While his literary creations don t always obey the laws of classical physics, they have an affinity for the quirks of quantum mechanics, and though they dispense with the logic of Aristotle, they replace it with the logic of dreams. Moving sometimes in a straight line, sometimes in an arabesque, the stories