Atet, A.D.

Art Lange

Atet, A.D. is a fascinating work of poetic/musical fiction-storytelling that plays with, and is inspired by, language and the mystical concepts and connections that arise unbidden from the manipulation of metaphor and meaning, while simultaneously fueled by the sounds and energy of American jazz which Mackey views as a source of spiritual and sexual discipline and discovery. The third book in his ongoing, open-ended, contemplative saga once again takes form as a sequence of letters from a free-jazz musician to an unappearing female muse known as "Angel of Dust." Not a lot of action takes place; the narrator, N., describes, questions and interprets the dynamic ebb and flow of musical and interpersonal relationships that he and the male and female members of his band share. But while dramatic events may be lacking, Mackey's multi-cultural cross-references combine in a rich fabric of fantasy, psychology and symbolism. Best of all, Mackey knows the music inside-out, and has a remarkable ability to express the deep and far-reaching emotional and intellectual resonances which jazz engenders; this allows him to compose his tale in a musical fashion, with motifs that appear, modulate and recur in different guises, twists of phrases that trace turns of thought, circuitous processes of thematic development, puns, rhythms, rhyming inferences and sheerly lyrical outbursts of pure speculation. The story comes to no conclusion, but the journey is so engaging that it doesn't matter. The music is the message.
— Tower Records: Pulse Holiday Gift Guide

Publishers Weekly

Mackey is an extraordinarily accomplished maverick poet, editor and critic, and this third installment in the escapades of his Mystic Horn Society--a fiction jazz ensemble that microcosmically concentrates the ins-and-out of verbal, spiritual, and musical relationships-- has all the charged verve of Henry James encountering Charlie Parker's Ko-Ko and perfectly transcribing every note and nuance.

Rain Taxi Review of Books

The real triumph of the book, however, is the texture of Mackey's form and language itself, a form that is part fiction, part poetry, manifesto, and music, a language simultaneously comic, erotic, discursive.

Publishers Weekly

This third volume of Mackey's From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate series returns to the story of the Mystic Horn Society, a musical outfit that seem to court supernatural disaster at every turn. Like its predecessors, Bedouin Hornbook and Djbot Baghostus's Run, Atet A.D. is composed mostly of letters by composer/musician "N." addressed to a mysterious correspondent, "Angel of Dust," to whom N. recounts odd events, giving them an equally odd interpretive spin. The central turn in this volume occurs at a performance in Seattle in which one of the horn players, Penguin, suddenly acquires for an evening the ability to project cartoon-like thought balloons, text and all, out of his oboe. As with all of Mackey's prose fiction, his hermeneutic speculations are advanced as much by the power of puns as by syllogistic reasoning. For all the wordplay, Mackey manages to cover a lot of ground in this neo-novel, which is not so much about "characters" as it is about ideas and themes like gender equality, the survival of African customs and spiritual values in America, and the play of dreams within our waking realities. Most idiosyncratically, Mackey, with his nuanced knowledge of jazz, convinces the reader that music operates like a language, with all the power to convey, say, a specific feminist critique of male-centered jazz culture, or to acquire levels of symbolism that would make Dante wonder if he should have taken up sax. (Nov.) Forecast: Mackey is an editor of the Library of America's anthology of 20th-century poetry, a professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and a well-known figure in experimental writing circles. The Broken Bottle titles have already begunshowing up on syllabi; if kept in stock and displayed together, expect solid browser-based sales. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.