Don LaCoss

Don LaCoss, radical scholar and writer, and member of the International Surrealist Movement, died on January 31st at age 46.

While we never met, I appreciated his comradely correspondence over the last decade. He generously sent multiple copies of pamphlets, articles and collages. In the last several years, among other places, his writings appeared in Benjamin Peret: A Menagerie in Revolt (Black Swan Press, 2009) and in the pages of the Fifth Estate. He also wrote a pamphlet on the surrealist presence during the May 1968 Parisian uprising and was working on a book about Egyptian and Arab surrealism* as well as a forthcoming issue of Fifth Estate when he died.

My empathy to his family and friends.

You can read more about him on this memorial page.

There are also some tributes here.

*Some of his writings on Egyptian and Arab Surrealism can be found in issues 21 and 22 of the magazine Communicating Vessels which are available for a (cash) donation or postage stamps from PO Box 83408, Portland, Oregon, 97283. I also highly recommend the aforementioned book on Peret which features Don's afterword entitled 'Benjamin Peret and the Ecological Imagination' where he wrote: "Poetry wrings out the repression that saturates our words and phrases by turning them inside out and knotting them together into stormy new topological geometries."