~ The Phantasmagorical World of Susan Budd ~
Psychedelic Poetry and Philosophical Fables
Metaphysical questions about consciousness and dreams have always fascinated me. From childhood, I loved reading fantasies, myths, and fairy tales. I loved reverie and introspection. Later I studied philosophy of mind and the spiritual mysticism of East and West. I explored visionary literature and art. I scrutinized my own mind. Now I’m a professor of philosophy and literature at the City University of New York.
My first book was Visions, a montage of psychedelic dream poems. Visions was born of my fascination with the mind and its modes of perception. It was also strongly influenced by my love of art and music. My novella, Felicity, is a dreamlike philosophical fable about the nature of reality and the meaning of life.
Visions is a psychedelic odyssey of the imagination. In this kaleidoscopic collection of story poems, the boundaries between reality and fantasy are blurred. A blind artist is driven to madness by dreams of light and color. An old woman steps out of time and becomes a child again. An odalisque luxuriates in sensuous indolence. A lonely little girl meets a very unusual friend on the moon. And more!
Rhetorically sophisticated yet playful, the language in this cycle of twenty-five story poems is richly descriptive, evoking the fantastic and mythical realms of dream, madness, and vision.
Felicity is at once a philosophical fable, a dream, and a prose-poem. The main character of this surreal and symbolic novella finds herself in a world of bizarre happenings, irrational dream logic, and paradoxes in time and space. She doesn’t know what she is or where she is, she doesn’t know why she is here or how she came to be here, but she must learn to live in this world and give meaning to her life.
Told in cadenced prose that is aesthetically simple, lucid, and spare, this unique metaphysical fantasy explores the nature of dream and reality, consciousness and time, knowledge and art.