Lehóczky’s, Ágnes: Apropos Paradise Square

Pamenar Press, paperback

Publication Date: July 1, 2025

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Apropos Paradise Square – On a Literature of Consolation

The second part of a larger project on ‘the poet’s house’, Apropos Paradise Square generates a psychogeographical inquiry with a clinical critical intensity to the remembering and reconstructing of museal spaces which we, eleatic strangers, passengers par excellence, optimistic eyewitnesses, near or far dwellers, might be able to inhabit as ‘horizontal’ spaces of temporary, short term residencies or as elective, or even as posthumous homes.

The work continues to experiment with and to stretch our expectations of what constitutes ekphrastic writing, weaving here an intricately labyrinthine hybrid work of readerly poetics, a hyper sensitive textual dérive that explores the blue or bluish zone of a ‘lost girls’ home’, and a paranoiac re reading and re examining of the impermanent households of the corner of the eye horizon girl, the ersatz I, the temperamental tomboy, the paranoid parasitic self, the premature paper citizen in and of ‘unsettled status’. This is a status quo granted by both or either choice and chance enabling the antagonistic one to reside in a speculative and hyper real shelter, a quasi mausoleum, a home spun paradise square, an untrue, abstract asylum or a self made ‘hortus botanicus’, architectonically designed and built as unfinished building or as abandoned book or as subterranean syntax in a cognitively hypothesised country of the in between, a space which Hannah Arendt calls ‘nowhere’, always already split, permitting the abstracted one to occupy this side of, preoccupied by the outside of, consciousness – having lived wilfully and long enough on its outer side to be neitherside, postponed, deferred and stashed away. A status or zone of deep sleep, temporary dormancy, impermanent waiting which, paradoxically, nevertheless, holds and gives one hope for and promises, preserves and or presumes a future.