Scan barcode
rachelwalexander's review
4.0
This was a delightfully weird book that I am going to struggle to describe but definitely enjoyed reading. Part poetry, part art, part hallucination (?), part meditation on mortality and competence and race. Pop an edible, pick it up and just experience it.
swineberg's review
4.0
Well isn’t this just a fragmentary, hypnotic, multidisciplinary art installation between two covers!
In short: I thought this was a neat read! Very weird! Enjoyable! Confounding! Took a lot away from it, there’s so much pleasure in being carried along by something like this, Check it out!
In long: Pilot Impostor is a consistently surprising and flat-out strange reading experience. It feels more personal than a straight-up memoir or poetry, as Hanneham brings you on an intimate tour of his brain in a moment of time as you look at pictures of planes and square-based art while zinging from personal anecdote to plane crash to historical footnote to sociopolitical comment to philosophical introspection to poem to nouveau fable to chunk of text that defies neat categorization. It’s sometimes silly, sometimes confounding, constantly changing tempo on you.
And this book is really fucking playful!! There are unexpected moments of humor and simplicity bursting through even the headiest or airiest moments of the book, a reminder that not all art has to be understood like a math problem or be designed to jerk the feelings out of you like a box of Kleenex. Art isn’t a riddle to be solved, it says, what are you, a narc? Now hold on while I give you a delicate metaphor for the self. Please pause for a moment of deep thought and sincerity. This note about dead authors ends in a pun.
I can truly say that I never knew what the next page was going to hold, or how to connect every dot, or even if I should. Hanneham shows his work by noting on almost every page a poem that has a thematic or formal similarity to what he has written. Given that the book deals with the self, artifice, and the construction of meaning…this feels to me less like a citing of sources and more like a dare, challenging the reader to keep looking deeper as if there’s something more or truer than what’s on the page.
That said, read about the poet Fernando Passoa before you read this book (even just a little).
In short: I thought this was a neat read! Very weird! Enjoyable! Confounding! Took a lot away from it, there’s so much pleasure in being carried along by something like this, Check it out!
In long: Pilot Impostor is a consistently surprising and flat-out strange reading experience. It feels more personal than a straight-up memoir or poetry, as Hanneham brings you on an intimate tour of his brain in a moment of time as you look at pictures of planes and square-based art while zinging from personal anecdote to plane crash to historical footnote to sociopolitical comment to philosophical introspection to poem to nouveau fable to chunk of text that defies neat categorization. It’s sometimes silly, sometimes confounding, constantly changing tempo on you.
And this book is really fucking playful!! There are unexpected moments of humor and simplicity bursting through even the headiest or airiest moments of the book, a reminder that not all art has to be understood like a math problem or be designed to jerk the feelings out of you like a box of Kleenex. Art isn’t a riddle to be solved, it says, what are you, a narc? Now hold on while I give you a delicate metaphor for the self. Please pause for a moment of deep thought and sincerity. This note about dead authors ends in a pun.
I can truly say that I never knew what the next page was going to hold, or how to connect every dot, or even if I should. Hanneham shows his work by noting on almost every page a poem that has a thematic or formal similarity to what he has written. Given that the book deals with the self, artifice, and the construction of meaning…this feels to me less like a citing of sources and more like a dare, challenging the reader to keep looking deeper as if there’s something more or truer than what’s on the page.
That said, read about the poet Fernando Passoa before you read this book (even just a little).
tinamayreads's review
4.0
PILOT IMPOSTOR by James Hannaham is such a unique book! It’s my first hardcover book from Soft Skull Press. Reading this book is like taking a flight through a creative literary mind with a shape shifting flight plan. Taking inspiration from Fernando Pessoa’s poetry and air disasters this book features prose and full colour images. It was a thrill to turn the page! I really enjoyed this book! It totally appeals to my love of poetry, radical writing and short fiction. I’m very curious to read the poetry of Pessoa now. I love a book that inspires me to keep reading!
.
Also love the jacket design and Soft Skull art direction by House of Thought!
.
Thank you to Soft Skull Press for my gifted review copy!
.
Also love the jacket design and Soft Skull art direction by House of Thought!
.
Thank you to Soft Skull Press for my gifted review copy!
lindsayb's review
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
Darkly humorous and absurd. Stellar existential reading.
More...