Words

Andy Devine’s Words is incomparable, utterly original, and a joy to experience. It is such a unique piece of art, that the first time you read it (and I imagine you’ll read it many times) it will shock your sensibilities in the same way as the first view of a Pollock might.
–Jessica Anya Blau
“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.”
–David McLendon

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.”
–Josh Maday

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.
–Michael Kimball

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.
–Blake Butler