Cronk, Olivia: Gwenda Rodney

Olivia Cronk's Gwenda, Rodney is an exquisitely genre-ambiguous “poetry novel” scintillating with art, ardor, and decay. It's a book about reading novels, ekphrasis, and the gaze, transcribed in a mode as ethereal as air filling a garment left to hang. Inspired by theater, Dario Argento's luscious horror aesthetics, the gaudy-spectacle-art of Toulouse-Lautrec’s paintings and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s films, and the feeling of reading novels like drinking endless water, Gwenda, Rodney, is an inspiration, an exhalation, a quivering ruby of obsession on display.

Olivia Cronk is the author of WOMONSTER (Tarpaulin Sky, 2020), Louise and Louise and Louise (The Lettered Streets Press, 2016), and Skin Horse (Action Books, 2012).

“There is a great excitement in reading Gwenda, Rodney, like coming to Mina Loy or Silvina Ocampo or Fleur Jaeggy for the first time, a feeling that you are experiencing literature at its most exhilarating, wild, and imaginative register.” –AMINA CAIN

"Olivia Cronk creates a world in which desire feels like dazzling bouquet of decay. In Gwenda, Rodney we encounter a web of relations punctuated by echoes, blood blooms, and hypnotic sequences. The details that structure the book’s scenes are marked by an iridescent, lurking under-hum. The effect is mesmerizing." –SELAH SATERSTROM

"Olivia Cronk’s Gwenda, Rodney paints what it feels like to be consumed by a shadowy relationship where perceptions form a distorted reality and pull you deeper and deeper within. Everything is so slippery, from the language to the unexpected imagery—all while handholds of reality are illuminated in flashes, much like being led into a dark room, shining a flashlight quickly. But it's only temporary before shit becomes slippery again." –STEVEN DUNN