Blurb for Bombyonder

Some kind of war happened at some time or another and continued for quite some time to come. So begins Bombyonder, Reb Livingston’s blistering, kaleidoscopic, post-bomb-blast shrapnel-storm of a book. Bombs, masks, machinery, birds buried at the bottoms of women, emerge and recede in the blistering landscape. You ride in a vehicle with a thousand gears, each ratcheting the velocity upward. You will encounter Mrs. Butterworth, Home Depot, Rapunzel, Facebook, Leona Helmsley and countless others in a blur of narratives, dreams, texts and diary entries. When you reach for your seat belt, which you will, you will come up with Medusa’s snakes in your clenched hands. But Bombyonder is not merely a scathing, slicingly funny assemblage. Livingston devises a pulsing, haywire logic that somehow rivets the parts to each other and the reader to the page. Through the marvel of her language, the book becomes a shimmering whole; a miracle met like the first mirror. Bombyonder transcends any sense of “experimentation,” and occupies, essentially, its own genre. I came from a long line of fuses Livingston’s central character reports. Leave your cardboard containers at the door. Bring your own oxygen. You cannot be ready or more ready. The narrator tells us: Between a gauntlet of opposing dogs, she walked between two lines.This was her path. Livingston has delivered a fabulous, mind bending book. Honestly, I do not know how she survived the writing of it.

— Lindsay Hill, author of Sea of Hooks