"I dare anyone to sit alone in a room and read
this book aloud. It's what I did, and I'm all the
more damaged and alive because of it. The
stuttering lucidity of Devine is perhaps too new
and lasting for most, but Devine has arrived and
his pages are here to stay. He is our first
Neo-Phoenician. Each repeated sound desperately
matters, as each returns from itself and boldly
moves forth."
“WORDS is unlike any writing by even the riskiest
literary innovators working today. Devine has
dismantled the English language to its elemental
state and has used recognizable words to build a
language beyond language.”
"In Andy Devine’s
WORDS, the reader becomes the writer and the text
must be interpreted to create meaning, sense,
sentences, story, plot, etc. Devine has
discovered a way to fill a single page of fiction
with thousands of words and his novel is an
amazing feat of brevity and scope."
"On the Periodic
Table of Language, Andy Devine is both hydrogen
and lanthanoid; that is, devised both of our most
common components, found there in all things,
that which when forced to split will cause
explosion; and at the same time, of a rare-earth:
used as a catalyst, an ignition element in
lighters and torches, an electron cathode, a
scintillator. Where Devine devinely deconstructs
before our eyes our words into their
long-disguised periodic tables, we are witness to
language not as we've watched it wrangled into
mirages all these years, but a dismantling, a
reminder, of the cells and syllables from whence
we came, and where as both reader and creator we
may begin again."
