Molloy: The Flip Side

Poetry. MOLLOY: THE FLIP SIDE transcreates the first half of Beckett's 1951 French novel, narrated by its eponymous antihero who is slowly going nowhere. The hobo lyrics of Tysh's book-length poem open up the unendurable abyss of being, yet zing with vernacular and zany humor: "Gotta check out soon / Be done with dying," Molloy says, but there's a few things he must do first. And so begins the uncanny journey in this poetic B-side of Beckett's masterpiece.

"In MOLLOY: THE FLIP SIDE, Chris Tysh transcreates—rather than translates—the Beckett classic into a Matthew O'Connor-cum-Tiresias rant. 'Has a leak in his tank / Button missing a hole / In his wig, you feel me?" The indeterminate narrator of Tysh's formal tercets replicates the dialectics of gender, the Oedipal complex ('The thing is Mother and I— / My shitty start—are so old now / We're like two sere fucks on a rail') and, more generally, the problem of desire and knowledge vis-à- vis the world. That's a heady set of balls to keep up in the air, but Tysh's nimble enjambments and seamless heteroglossia (existential angst dukes it out with post-trip-hop surliness) keep things moving, propelling this mock-epic to its jocular, inconclusive, stop."—Tyrone Williams