“A primer for enduring the brutality that is the world, THE BOOK OF THE RED ABSURD is not for the faint of heart. With a devotional criminality, Rivera fronts the ‘fascism of fun,’ the carcass that childhoods feed on, the savage fictions essential to living while ‘the bodies pile up: cold, soulless and mean.’ Here, the monstrous is monstrance encasing a ‘sublime purgatorial nihilism.’ Here is depravity, diabolism, depression, and ‘the art that counters.’ It’s an art borne by a parade of saints—Arthur, Emily, Gennady, Claire—and it’s an art ‘made from waste’—that’s all there is to offer.”

“A dark energy pulses through Rivera’s THE BOOK OF THE RED ABSURD. It is an energy manifesting itself in ‘Anxiety, sexuality, torment, divinity, redemption also.’ But that is not enough. It is not merely psychic; it is not merely spiritual. It is linguistic, formal. In harsh paragraphs of self-chastisement, in micro-lines of verse burned into white space, in the company of mysterious rabbis and an odd array of totemic literary precursors (would Kafka be happy to be named here?), this energy bursts into flower, a cinematic presentation of a personal life that cannot stay personal, that embraces culture, embraces history, that cuts itself and bleeds the Red Absurd. Here is horror and beauty in equal measure. Reader, beware—these sorrows are your own.”

“This book is a Baedeker guide to be consulted during a tour of the circles. It’s an orientation exercise made of lengthening shadows, darkening matter, and tapering flames. Its author was last seen at a sensory hinge where the demons are conciliatory, but the angels want to negotiate. It’s all part of a pedagogy without precedent, a setting forth ‘on the tightrope which is any inquiry.’ His travails are our syllabus, his experience our instruction. Welcome to the first day of school.”