World Series Chri$t imagines the whole of humanity as a series of small buildings. Billions and billions of buildings that make up the larger city, or mind. When you think of the book in these terms, it becomes easier to accept the constant destruction that hammers away at these buildings. It’s impossible to claim that William Seward Bonnie’s latest is about any one thing. However, if you still wanted to reach for that kind of perspective, you could say that World Series Chri$t is about the end of the world as Bonnie envisions it. The buildings are being burnt down. Or they’re just falling apart. Or they are simply being torn down brick by brick by malcontent citizens.
However you want to look at these strange, hellish poems/prose pieces, the concepts of death and chaos remain consistent. But again, you have to keep in mind that the book nonetheless refuses to be seriously and definitively connected to any singular theme. Things move quickly in these poems. Generations seemingly appear, fall, remerge, and join an increasingly complicated skyline of delirious proportions and combinations. Individual characters most certainly do not exist, but there are a variety of vaguely familiar, mostly human-shaped shadows that come and go. As Bonnie writes “I was an elegant masterpiece doused in kerosene”, you can see this protagonist. It might be Bonnie, but you really can’t say for sure. Or it’s that you don’t want to say for sure. Even as Bonnie writes about himself, or variations of how he perceives himself, you can easily imagine a much larger cast of these shadows we’re talking about.
To put it another way, World Series Chri$t does not feel like a one-man show. Whether Bonnie is really that good at creative subterfuge (it’s certainly possible), or whether he has chosen to suggest a single personality through thousands of mutated mirror versions, we can’t say. All we can do is keep up with his ferocious, maniacal attention to poetic structure, and make our meager guesses along the way. It helps that in the end, we realize that it doesn’t matter if we’re right or wrong. All that matters is that we stay to the end. You will.
