PONCKHOCKIE UNION

Brent Robison

PONCKHOCKIE UNION

Brent Robison

Ponckhockie Union_V2_ 2024
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PONCKHOCKIE UNION

A novel

Benedict Arnold Rose is a filmmaker in a troubled marriage. As he begins a documentary on the 1777 burning of New York’s first capital, Kingston, by the British, his history-focused life is suddenly derailed. He faces shadowy assassins with multiple identities, indoctrination in a dark cell, seduction, betrayal, the finality of fire, and the unexpected kindness of a stranger. He must journey within, but what is real? And who is asking? Coincidence and paradox abound as Rose finds his way to a new life…but the questions without answers still remain.
 
Encounters with a fictional version of the well-known author Paul Auster, and with a mercenary soldier who is also a devotee of the Indian spiritual guru Nisargadatta Maharaj, entwine the metafictional with the metaphysical in a speculative swirl of mystery, history, and self-inquiry.

Benedict Arnold Rose is a filmmaker in a troubled marriage. As he begins a documentary on the 1777 burning of New York’s first capital, Kingston, by the British, his history-focused life is suddenly derailed. He faces shadowy assassins with multiple identities, indoctrination in a dark cell, seduction, betrayal, the finality of fire, and the unexpected kindness of a stranger. He must journey within, but what is real? And who is asking? Coincidence and paradox abound as Rose finds his way to a new life…but the questions without answers still remain.
 
Encounters with a fictional version of the well-known author Paul Auster, and with a mercenary soldier who is also a devotee of the Indian spiritual guru Nisargadatta Maharaj, entwine the metafictional with the metaphysical in a speculative swirl of mystery, history, and self-inquiry.

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Reviews

A complex, fascinating and suspenseful journey into the past—and the myriad ways it can impact and threaten the here and now. As a Hudson Valley resident, I also loved the deep exploration of our area's history. A truly unique book.

—Alison Gaylin, the Edgar Award-winning author of If I Die Tonight

Ponckhockie Union is a mad fireworks display of global conspiracy and paranoia, haunted synchronicities, shadow-world manipulations of history, tricksters and false guides and the sudden and irreparable rupture of everything normal and stable in one man’s life. It also posits a model of what a sturdy self might look like after such a rupture, after acute exposure to the things going on underground and overhead.

—John Burdick, Almanac Weekly, HV1 (read entire review here »)

Ponckhockie Union is an alchemical exploit in which trauma and synchronicity operate as elixirs, ennobling ordinary lives. Its elegant clarity presents two kinds of detective story, one unfolding in New York’s Hudson Valley and the other in the mind of a man who finds his own sense of self getting in the way of his highest aspiration, which is to transcend the world of category and convention and dissolve into the primal material of the cosmos, hence the title, Ponckhockie Union.

—Djelloul Marbrook, award-winning poet/novelist, Far from Algiers, The Light Piercing Water Trilogy

Ponckhockie Union is an enthralling detective story of the mysteries within the divided self. It's brilliantly written with a penetrating nondual intelligence. I couldn't put it down!

—Gail D. Storey, Author of I Promise Not to Suffer: A Fool for Love Hikes the Pacific Crest Trail 

Ponckhockie Union is... a literary thriller that declines to placate a reader with genre guardrails; it is a metaphysical rumination that won’t settle for mystical satiety. Brace yourself. The story is intense, and the writing is terrific.
—Vic Peterson, author of The Berserkers
A complex, fascinating and suspenseful journey into the past—and the myriad ways it can impact and threaten the here and now. As a Hudson Valley resident, I also loved the deep exploration of our area's history. A truly unique book.

—Alison Gaylin, the Edgar Award-winning author of If I Die Tonight

Ponckhockie Union is a mad fireworks display of global conspiracy and paranoia, haunted synchronicities, shadow-world manipulations of history, tricksters and false guides and the sudden and irreparable rupture of everything normal and stable in one man’s life. It also posits a model of what a sturdy self might look like after such a rupture, after acute exposure to the things going on underground and overhead.

—John Burdick, Almanac Weekly, HV1 (read entire review here »)

Ponckhockie Union is an alchemical exploit in which trauma and synchronicity operate as elixirs, ennobling ordinary lives. Its elegant clarity presents two kinds of detective story, one unfolding in New York’s Hudson Valley and the other in the mind of a man who finds his own sense of self getting in the way of his highest aspiration, which is to transcend the world of category and convention and dissolve into the primal material of the cosmos, hence the title, Ponckhockie Union.

—Djelloul Marbrook, award-winning poet/novelist, Far from Algiers, The Light Piercing Water Trilogy

Ponckhockie Union is an enthralling detective story of the mysteries within the divided self. It's brilliantly written with a penetrating nondual intelligence. I couldn't put it down!

—Gail D. Storey, Author of I Promise Not to Suffer: A Fool for Love Hikes the Pacific Crest Trail 

Ponckhockie Union is... a literary thriller that declines to placate a reader with genre guardrails; it is a metaphysical rumination that won’t settle for mystical satiety. Brace yourself. The story is intense, and the writing is terrific.
—Vic Peterson, author of The Berserkers

Hear excerpts and discussions on The Strange Recital podcast

Excerpts from Ponckhockie Union

 Ponckhockie Union

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 Lester's Story

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Rose and Cross

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About the author

Brent Robison lives in the Catskill Mountains of New York with his wife, a maker of fabulous masks. His fiction has appeared in over a dozen literary journals and several anthologies, and has won the Literal Latte Short Short Award, the Chronogram Short Fiction Contest, a Fiction Fellowship from the New Jersey Council on the Arts, and a Pushcart Prize nomination. He is the author of a story collection, The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility, and two novels, Ponckhockie Union and A Book with No Author, all from Recital Publishing. He blogs occasionally at Ultimate-Indivisibility, and co-hosts The Strange Recital, a monthly podcast about fiction that questions the nature of reality.

Brent Apr 11 2019_edited-1crop
Brent Apr 11 2019_edited-1crop

Brent Robison lives in the Catskill Mountains of New York with his wife, a maker of fabulous masks. His fiction has appeared in over a dozen literary journals and several anthologies, and has won the Literal Latte Short Short Award, the Chronogram Short Fiction Contest, a Fiction Fellowship from the New Jersey Council on the Arts, and a Pushcart Prize nomination. He is the author of a story collection, The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility, and two novels, Ponckhockie Union and A Book with No Author, all from Recital Publishing. He blogs occasionally at Ultimate-Indivisibility, and co-hosts The Strange Recital, a monthly podcast about fiction that questions the nature of reality.

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