Sirens is the lyrical story of Her which means it is the story of you and I, just as it’s also our story too, and a story that has yet to be, a story that is now, and a story from before (which is to say it is spun from the fabric of myth). If David Lynch died and reincarnated into the body of a little girl with wings who hatched from an egg painted by Leonora Carrington’s ghost, Sirens would be the fairy tale this version of Lynch would then write. Toni Oswald has paid homage to the Dadaists and the Surrealists equally in this creation of story and sound; this hybrid narrative about a hybrid character that asks the reader to engage in this fever dream about being born and giving birth, about dying and being resurrected. Sirens then shape-shifts into a recipe for baking blue pies before reshaping itself into a ritual and feminist manifesto before blooming into a wound that is stitched together using embroidery to draw a palimpsest of the sacred pussy upon the page. The synesthesia in Oswald’s language borders on mysticism as the reader witnesses light become smitten with the velvet darkness of the void, to then watch the void thrust itself into the mercurial surface of a mirror where shadows play in the threshold between reflection and the corporeal. Sirens is an interactive narrative that invites us in so we can explore all the serpentine trajectories of the Self. I love this poetic narrative so much I’m tempted for my next tattoo to read: “Let’s be friends even when there is no us” because that is exactly how I feel about the book from which this line was excerpted and the author who composed it.

                                —Sarah Elizabeth Schantz, Fig 

 

Film by Jonas Leuenberger

Music by Max Davies

Sirens out Now on Gesture Press and Amazon

https://www.amazon.com/Sirens-Toni-Oswald/dp/0578773945/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3OJ28MEADKMBO&dchild=1&keywords=sirens+toni+oswald&qid=1606242011&s=books&sprefix=sirens+t%2Caps%2C257&sr=1-1