derek beaulieu reviews Ex Machina

Thrilled to see that derek beaulieu has reviewed Ex Machina on his website (click quote for full article):

William S. Burroughs notoriously postulated “language is a virus from outer space” and that we are simply hosts for the spread of this linguistic extraterrestrial disease. Ball’s novel articulates the nature of the parasitic relationship between book, text and reader. While Phyllis Webb famously stated “[t]he proper response to a poem is another poem,” Ball makes the generative quality that Webb desired fraught with the sinister overtones of mutation, for the book machine seeks those “who process the poem, to great effect: host minds for newer and stronger strains” (57)