{"id":118,"date":"2020-06-02T03:34:16","date_gmt":"2020-06-02T03:34:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sporkpress.com\/shop\/?post_type=product&#038;p=118"},"modified":"2020-06-09T19:45:53","modified_gmt":"2020-06-09T19:45:53","slug":"kathleen-rooney-the-listening-room","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/shop\/product\/kathleen-rooney-the-listening-room\/","title":{"rendered":"Kathleen Rooney, &#8220;The Listening Room&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cThe house is haunted but nobody\u2019s home. Only us chickens, standing still as sculpture while Loulou, the immortal Pomeranian, &amp; Georgette, Magritte\u2019s guardian angel, take us on a tour of the asylum. The rooms in Kathleen Rooney\u2019s\u00a0<em>The Listening Room\u00a0<\/em>are always listening, always watching. The walls have ears. The tears have eyes. Sometimes the screams are silent. Sometimes the silence is deafening. Stark &amp; hard-edged as the paintings themselves, this novel in poems and flashes inhabits a world much like our own \u2014 suspended in a glazed animation of doomed hope &amp; hopeful doom, where the virtual is realer than reality, where the muse &amp; the bemused are confused, where the funny is wedded to the sad in unholy matrimony. \u2018Mystery,\u2019 Magritte wrote late in life, \u2018is not one of the possibilities of reality. Mystery is what is absolutely necessary for reality to exist.\u2019 Take a load off. Escape is not an option. There are no windows &amp; no doors,\u00a0only holes through which the sky or an oncoming train pours in. The stairs dead end. The clouds are voodoo dolls, sweet enough to eat. But who, Georgette &amp; Loulou forever wonder, will devour whom?\u201d<br \/>\n\u2014Eric Plattner, co-editor of\u00a0<em>Ren\u00e9 Magritte: Selected Writings <\/em><\/p>\n<p>\u201cKathleen Rooney\u2019s exquisite novelette must be the most Magrittian way to engage with the life, love, Loulou(s), and oeuvre of Ren\u00e9 Magritte\u2014from his \u2018uxorious\u2019 devotion to his wife Georgette to the \u2018traitorous pancreas\u2019 that killed him. Magritte once said that \u2018Every single thing which we see conceals something else,\u2019 but\u00a0 <em>The Listening Room\u00a0<\/em>sees all, unveiling the real-life characters behind Magritte\u2019s many veils. Each ekphrastic account reveals a quotidian tale of art and love just as so many of Magritte\u2019s parted curtains reveal a cloud-filled sky. To read Rooney\u2019s flashes is to wander within the wonder of a Magritte painting.\u201d<br \/>\n\u2014Kelcey\u00a0Parker Ervick, author of\u00a0<em>The Bitter Life of Bozena Nemcova <\/em><\/p>\n<p>&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;-<\/p>\n<p>A founding editor of Rose Metal Press and a founding member of Poems While You Wait, Kathleen Rooney is the author, most recently, of the novel <em>Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk<\/em> (St. Martin&#8217;s Press, 2017). With Eric Plattner, she is the co-editor of <em>Rene Magritte: Selected Writings<\/em> (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). Married to the writer, Martin Seay, she lives in Chicago and teaches at DePaul University.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The house is haunted but nobody&#8217;s home. Only us chickens, standing still as sculpture while Loulou, the immortal Pomeranian, &amp; Georgette, Magritte&#8217;s guardian angel, take us on a tour of the asylum.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":88,"template":"","meta":[],"product_brand":[],"product_cat":[25],"product_tag":[36,50,52,51],"class_list":{"0":"post-118","1":"product","2":"type-product","3":"status-publish","4":"has-post-thumbnail","6":"product_cat-fiction","7":"product_tag-fiction","8":"product_tag-kathleen-rooney","9":"product_tag-loulou","10":"product_tag-magritte","12":"first","13":"instock","14":"shipping-taxable","15":"purchasable","16":"product-type-simple"},"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product\/118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/product"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/88"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"product_brand","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_brand?post=118"},{"taxonomy":"product_cat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_cat?post=118"},{"taxonomy":"product_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_tag?post=118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}