In George Le Nonce’s The Oracle, which he describes as a mixed-media composition, there is no anax and no worship of the Logician. In his place, there are thirty-five ten-dead poets who parade through, communicating with the poet from the other world; after delivering to him, as credentials, their oracles, they return as muses and inspire, or dictate, each in her own way, poems that, paradoxically, attempt to reveal the identity of the recipient, an identity that the dead poets’ own second presence challenges and perverts.

Preceding the oracles and poems of Mandeus is a self-mythographic pseudo-essay, in which it seems to me that Le Nonce neither says nor means, but rather attempts to conceal the voice of the anaconda; above all, however, he plays; above all, he undermines the very notion of the person, of identity and of the personal voice. (Angelos Ambrotos, Story Bridge Journal, November 2024)