Jonas in Frames
an epic
Jonas in Frames is [choose one]: A) a series of loosely connected narrative fragments written in poetic prose; B) a maze of postcard stories bursting with literary in-jokes; C) a delicate sequence of prose poems interspersed with narrative interludes; or D) haunted by the ghost of Samuel Beckett.
In its esoteric glimpse into the disassociated, Jonas in Frames contorts time and space. Rootless, nostalgic, socially inept, Jonas is the modern questless hero, an exemplar of generational anxiety eternally on the brink of pitching into a graveyard spin.
A volatile amalgamation of identity crisis, fitful employment, and fanciful poetic imaginings delivers Jonas from sterile offices to anarchist squats, from skull-shattering saloons to faux-edgy hipstervilles and back again to capital-N Nowhere. As Jonas navigates an onslaught of geographical, mental, and temporal turbulence, his lives collide, splinter, and too often shatter.
Jonas in Frames does and does not cohere. Its sense is clandestine. Its form is fractal.
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"Hutchinson uses his experimental style to render in print his protagonists experiences, detailing his hallucinations, blackouts, and ability to slip in time and from place to place." — Canadian Literature
"Imagine a twenty-first-century Frankenstein built from the corpses of John Berryman and Elizabeth Smart and jolted alive by an electricity that is uniquely Chris Hutchinson. Now imagine this as a creature endowed with smart paranoia and queasy wit, who short-order-cooks, pill-pops, cubicle-hops, and jump-cuts its way through parallel realities and past lives, other selves in other times — gradually facing ‘the impossibility of our research ever coming to an end’ — and you've got the marvellous monster named Jonas in Frames." — Alayna Munce
"If we are to take contemporary writing at its word, then Chris Hutchinson is among its foremost practitioners, forsaking the certainties of space, time, and locus for that collective unconscious known as the Internet. This is fleet-of-foot, informed writing — that draws on a broad cultural reference range, a dual diagnosis of mental illness and drugs collaged from a million little pieces. Like his book's titular character, Hutchinson is a writer who had ‘lived with himself long enough to know that he is somehow different, and that there is no escaping.’ " — Michael Turner
Born in Montreal, Chris Hutchinson is the author of three previous collections of poetry (Unfamiliar Weather, Other People's Lives, and A Brief History of the Short-lived), as well as the speculative autobiographical verse novel Jonas in Frames. He holds a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. He now teaches at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta.
