Felonies of Illusion

138 pgs.
Cover by K. Lorraine Graham
$15

I won't go on about how much I like the poems in this book, but I'll go on at least a little: the lines are twisty, the rhythms complicated and unexpected. The poems have a trippy tension between how they feel/sound and what they are and are not saying.

Plus, I'm proud of the cover.

You can order Felonies of Illusion directly from Edge Books for $11!

Here's what other people say about the book:

A master at making genre question itself, Mark Wallace gets the square peg in the round hole again. A stark and aphoristic long poem about living and working during the war—direct, wise, and brave enough to skip the decorative—bumps up against the witty, clanging, angry, top-speed, palimpsestuous title series—lyrics that swallow their own tails. Wallace is cynical, clear-eyed, and resolutely jokey on commerce, war, love (the "therapeutic use of commitment") and exhausted longing ("This day could be about today, leisurely and bright/if the days weren't stacked like nights inside it.") Nobody gets away with anything in Felonies of Illusion: we're all skewered till we grimace and grin.

Catherine Wagner


Mark Wallace invents only what's real. If democracies could talk, we would in fact be able to understand them, but we would need the help of poems like these. As its title suggests, the language of Felonies of llusion is premised on a sense of justice and reciprocity. The need is real, and thus the need for invention is constant. The writing betrays no qualms about showing this. There's serious play going on here.

Bob Perelman


Elegaic without strings, passionate without bravado, up the tragic creek without a cathartic paddle, Mark Wallace’s Felonies of Illusion is an intensely personal collection of valedictions, an extended suite of lyric leavetakings written in the infinite series of penultimate milliseconds before an always-imminent obliteration—a “now” that “is not that long from now.” These already painful goodbyes, however, are suspended in a nervewracking holding pattern as “the total system / shouts back that there’s no way to leave.” Wallace rehearses the purgatorial illogic of perpetual orange alert with unsparing gravity, but also with empathy and wit. His poems confront us with the human truth of the narratives we spin daily in the name of individual survival at the same time that they caution us not to “get / too attached to the story told / imploding.”

K. Silem Mohammad

Walking Dreams: Selected Early Tales

Mark Wallace has a new book out of short stories called Walking Dreams: Selected Early Tales. The stories are very good--creepy, insightful, strange--and I did the typesetting.

A man tries to piece together the events of the day he nearly died. Another believes that a friend has betrayed him, or is it that he has betrayed himself? A woman tries to escape the life she has known, but finds it following her. The eight stories of disorientation and metamorphosis in Mark Wallace's Walking Dreams all concern characters who feel trapped and want to change who they are. The unconventional shape of these tales distorts time, place, and character to create an eerie and threatening atmosphere. The result is a series of surprises- some serious, some comic-in which the boundary between the real and the imagined breaks down. In the tradition of what British writer Robert Aickman called "the strange story," Walking Dreams explores a world that is poetic, horrifying, and very much like our own.

"Mark Wallace writes like an avant-garde poet who knows how to tell a good story. Or like a fiction writer who knows how to fill his prose with cutting edge poetry. You finish Wallace's fiction with much more than you began with, the sense that your reading intelligence has been scrambled into a new kind of clarity, a new kind of pleasure that can only be fully sorted out over time." -- Stephen-Paul Martin

Wallace Thinks Again!

Actually, Mark never stopped thinking, but he has started blogging.

Mark's first post over at Thinking Again wonders about the usefulness of genre, specifically relative to experimental fiction. This issue has been on my mind recently as I'm drafting a very very belated response to a discussion with Joseph Mosconi and Mark on media literacy and discipline in contemporary experimental poetry, among other things.

So, go have a look at Thinking Again, and tell Mark what you think. I, of course, already have.