Book Release Party!  

Backwards the Drowned Go Dreaming by Carl Watson

a gathering of the tribes gallery

2285 E. 3rd St.  2nd floor

Saturday Sept. 22nd. 7 pm.

Special guests and cheap refreshments

Backwards the Drowned Go Dreaming is the first novel in Carl Watson's trilogy covering the last three decades of the 20th century.  It is published by Sensitive Skin Books, the book publishing arm of Sensitive Skin magazine.  Watson will be reading excerpts from the book, and along with other material. Special guests will also be on hand.  Come celebrate in the relaxed atmosphere of the Tribes Gallery, one of the great cultural institutions of the East Village.

Carl Watson evokes his desolation angels with great empathy and care, but also with ruthless candor. He writes like someone who pushed himself to the wall, then pushed through it to the void and came back with stories to tell. Here he reclaims the Seventies, one of the more desolate of recent epochs, with the clarity of Proust, the balefulness of Bodenheim, and the raw honesty of an Iggy song. —John Strausbaugh, author of Black Like You and Sissy Nation“CW writes like he put his thumb in the air on some two-lane American highway that used to be an Indian Trail, where he got picked up by God. Like he has come back to the fire in the woods we have gathered around at the end of the world with our loved ones to tell us what he saw. —Andrew Huebner, author of  We Pierce,  American By Bloodand  East of Bowery

With prose unfurling like cigarette smoke bleeding into that cloud of half-forgotten memories forever shadowing missed opportunities that hangs over a noonday dive somewhere during the twilight of the last blown century, heartbreak rock-n-roll on the radio crackling in exquisite precision between am stations and windswept interstates, Carl Watson daydreams before silent black-and-white televisions in SRO lobbies or as he drinks himself sober in crumbling Chicago tenements. Backwards the Drowned Go Dreaming explodes the bleary-eyed myth of the American road. —Donald Breckenridge, author of This Young Girl Passing

Carl Watson’s work is desolate poetry. He writes with sharp nostalgia for a past that really wasn’t all that great. It feels like a stay in a down-and-out motel, but right on the other side of the paper-thin wall is transcendence. Watson never lets you forget that even in the most desperate situations, there is humor (even if it’s mostly black) and greatness of the spirit. —Emily XYZ, United States of Poetry