Either I Only Dreamt the Journey Along the Mississippi Or I’m Dreaming Now

Does everything flow? Like a progressively osculating billowing jumble in the form of words and forms without words, swirlings, dispersions and clusters of waves of reveries breaking in on themselves, flowing past the riverbanks of an internal landscape.

As though they were relational lines in the »stream of consciousness«, lines that touch, liaise, intersect, overlap only to lose one another again – like the lines on the palm of the hand. Completely innocuous causes that lead to effect and flow, are continued in the garish, crude movement of the word-images, the accumulation of thoughts, the allusions and unsteadiness of abruptly changing aspects.

In his new book, furnished lavishly with many drawings and paintings, Oswald Egger traces the memory, albeit one he does not remember himself, of the experience of Austrian emigrants to the USA in the years between 1880 to 1919, follows the whispered and internal connections of voices, the entangled threads of the stories through mines and forest to the large bodies of water: When the sentences, words and things appear as a multitude of small islands in the flowing fabric of impressions and emotions, the Mississippi becomes the mainstream of the secret history of ideas that are in a state of flux in between the worlds.

»At the end of this experiment, which spans 386 paragraphs, you are wide awake.« Paul Jandl, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

»Oswald Egger's language resembles a force, a cascade of thought, that expresses the full power of poetry.« Björn Hayer, NZZ am Sonntag

»A transmedial work of art, a correspondence of word and image. ... A Mississippi of poetry.« Martin Oehlen, Frankfurter Rundschau

»[Egger‘s] book is a sophisticated art work of text and image, which he has designed himself completely, and his language may be the most exciting thing to be read at the moment.« Alexander Schnickmann, Berliner Zeitung

»Immersing yourself in the language of the Mississippi, that’s something you have to let yourself in for, it takes a little effort, like every first jump into cold water, but once you’re in, it it’s wonderful ...« Linda Stift, Die Presse, Wien

»The poet's vocabulary and imagination are gigantic, his observations of nature very detailed ... a feast of language and musicality.« Falter

»If the term ›total work of art‹ applies to one of this season's new publications, it is undoubtedly Oswald Egger's Either I Only Dreamt the Journey Along the Mississippi Or I’m Dreaming Now.« ORF