Beyond the Planet of the Vampires by Ulrich Baer (CLASH, 2025)
"A speculative avant-garde queer horror novel that reads like an erotic vampiric nightmare directed by Jordowoski playing at a '50s drive-in.
Beyond the Planet of the Vampires is a gay pulp horror novel of chance. The narrative erratically loses and regains consciousness during an apocalyptic space invasion of psychic vampires, reaching across intergalactic fathoms in search of future victims.
Smoldering in a social alienation reminiscent of Genet's outlaw anti-heroes, and screaming with Joycean word play in an entirely new and unique idiom, where theories of Kant are situated with reckonings of identity and postulations on the nature of evil.
On each page, Ulrich Baer creates an enigmatic performance of both philosophical and queer thought, exercised through the rich aesthetic experience of a retro horror film. Beyond the Planet of the Vampires redefines avant-garde in a relentless, generation-defining voice."
Deer Black Out by Ulrich Baer (Red Hen, 2024)
"My favorite poetry is when we get to be creative with the poet. Ulrich Jesse K Baer provides space between his corresponding brilliant ideas for us to climb into the poem with him. Arrive at this book by leaning into the gears of your imagination! Deer Black Out reminds me walking is falling and catching ourselves with our feet. I am grateful for his challenging, emotional labor--"departed, yr stanzas/my withheld image of you/thins its swung moonlight." Let's get falling and catching ourselves! Let's go upstream to Baer country! I am an enormous fan of this poet and his book!"
- CAConrad
Midwestern Infinity Doctrine by Ulrich Baer (Apocalypse Party, 2021)
“Ulrich Jesse K Baer’s philosophical and entropic Midwestern Infinity Doctrine is more of a backward sermon than a doctrine, a sermon that sits on the edge of science and time, giving quenched counsels on existence, on survival, on livelihood, on the search within the UlrichJesseKBaerself: where the birth of the protagonist meets the birth of the author. Here language battlecrawls as a paranormal dual citizen of reality and lexical electrostatics. Everything in Baer’s penultimate world is comodulated for depth of chaos and for depth of furtive estrangements between logic and beauty. A place where language could experience post-traumatic disorder in science with some order and some chaos. Here the linear lives within the subliminal sequencing of itself, breaking out a kind of disco of sorrow, hypervigilant texts that hope to dance into bijections by abandoning itself to lexical chance. Here the abyss of Baer’s prosaic, cryogenic world does not thaw, but hyperventilate from insularity and significant enigma. The speaker is a surgeon of the nascent. A machine or an aperture that ejects snowclouds of lucid ambivalence. Of course, in the rhetorical exploration of the self, there is the reader, the cyborg, the villain, Ivan Ooze, then Paul Newman, and then Clarice Inspector who show up for Baer’s inexact mathematical party dressed like bullets out of an experimental pistol, all hoping to miss us softly, a few inches, from our true literary artery. Be colossal and enter with cosmic form."
- Vi Khi Nao
AT ONE END consists of excerpts from a longer science fiction epic where I primarily worked in a hybrid autofiction style borrowing from experimental poets like Ronald Johnson, the queer sci-fi of James Tiptree and Samuel Delany, astrophysics, and philosophy to attempt a mediation or recuperation of traumatic memory. I was inspired by the creative nonfiction work of writers such as Jenny Boully and Maggie Nelson as they attempt to navigate questions of identity and embodiedness through textual fragmentation and negative space.The conceptual basis for these stories resides in the trope of cosmic horror as cosmology horror. The formation of aggregational structures necessarily incorporates negative spaces which retain their irreducibility throughout the articulations of time. Memories decay back down within the joints, a rift without recourse that is summoning us to drown in a choreography of kinesthetic mnemonics. The trans body, here, my trans body represents an attempted topography, mouthing around shape-hood, which fails to resolve into any ideal epistemological dimensions but, instead, like the syntax, mutates within your looking at me. My body dashes away as what appeared to hold rigid boundaries reveals trapdoors, impossibly large and small annexes, contesting a notion of spatio-temporal fixity. Like a haunted house, you trespass through mirrors and revolving doors that open out into vast plains contained within miniature or microcosmic domesticities.
If you were born alone without a home world, if you had to reverse your own timeline to discover your origin point, crashlanding repeatedly within the illegible unregistered zones of human intimacy and interpersonal violence, you would make space craft music that never ends however it begins...
HOLODECK ONE by Ulrich Baer (MAGIC HELICOPTER, 2017)
“Ulrich Jesse K Baer’s devastatingly imaginative poems feel closer than any other contemporary poetry written in English to neo-Baroque writing from more southern regions of the hemisphere. IMHO at least. The norms limiting the sayable are as pulverized in Baer’s hands as in the poetry of Perlongher, Sarduy, Lezama Lima, Haroldo de Campos.
Witness language acquiring a propulsive force shattering the time and space divide: “we wind up / in two timezones of experiential / holodeck, I’m ignition / here?” None of these cosmo-terrestrial phenomenologists are part of the North American canon and yet it’d seem Baer has absorbed them all.
“Aleatory alterity” or astral projection? “Reentranced echolalia”? Sheer verbal articulations at the limits of desire and expression, “full of trans / verse wavenoise.”. - Mónica de la Torre
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