Green Roses Bloom for Icarus - Paperback

by Hiromi Yoshida (Author)

Throughout Green Roses Bloom for Icarus, the mythic Icarus is the floating signifier of desire

that circulates among us, and whose meaning and value fluctuate arbitrarily. Thus, Icarus is the

superseded superstar, the haunting specter, and the symptom of our collective disease, like a

randomly floating coronavirus particle. Icarus is also, a bad penny (or its flipside, corroded

obverse), a flipped bird, an obscene signifier-hermaphroditic diva, and graffiti scrawl.

To extricate ourselves from the circuitry of desire that the fall of Icarus catalyzed, we celebrate

the green rose, the symbol of emerging art in James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young

Man. Celebration converts the green of copper corrosion, of self-corrupting envy, into the green

of lyric seabloom and redemptive hope. Thus, Icarus plunges into the sea of green roses, only to

be resurrected endlessly.