Cunus

From Anxiety Press

"Cunus is a ritual, a purging. McDonough is grasping at high magic." - Michael Liska

"If Cunus was song, oh boy oh boy, I'd be swinging and cutting a rug to this tune. Who wouldn't?" - Omar King

"Christian McDonough is one of the most exciting writers working today. The usual accolades don't quite do him justice: honest, funny, inventive; more importantly, stimulating, free, shockingly uninterested in genre or established form. He isn't trying to impress, but this is why he is so charming. He isn't trying to be serious, but this is why his work is so layered with depth. He isn't trying to be ambitious, but he wrote a book of a thousand poems. A true original with no clear antecedent in a sea of same-old scenester posturing and flyover-state Bukowski imitations. But there is no bitterness here, no resentment. He isn't trying to be different, he isn't trying to be better, he just is." - Nicholas Clemente

From Texas-based poet and experimentalist, Christian McDonough, comes a project unlike anything else in the landscape of 21st century literature.

Written over the course of four weeks, Cunus is an attempt to overcome the self. Our narrator, also named Christian McDonough, excavates his history and reckons with his upbringing. Yet what sounds on the surface like "autofiction" soon reveals its depths, expanding to include a cast of characters (both real and imagined) as haunting as the face of any deep sea fish.

Drawing on 20th century philosophy and psychoanalysis, the roiling muck of the internet, ancient mythology, the mania of post-9/11 America, and the fraught realities of adolescence, Cunus is a psychedelic odyssey through the strange and sublime that paints a portrait of a young man who may save the world, if he doesn't choose to end it instead.