BlazeVOX22 Spring 2022

IntroductionIntroduction

Hello and welcome to the Spring 2022 issue of BlazeVOX! Presenting fine works of poetry, fiction, text art, visual poetry and arresting works of creative non-fiction written by authors from around world. Do have a look through the links below or browse through the whole issue in our Scribd embedded PDF, which you can download for free and take it with you anywhere on any device. Hurray!

In this issue we seek to avoid answers but rather to ask questions. With a subtle minimalistic approach, this issue of BlazeVOX focuses on the idea of ‘public space’ and more specifically on spaces where anyone can do anything at any given moment: the non-private space, the non-privately owned space, space that is economically uninteresting. The works collected feature coincidental, accidental and unexpected connections, which make it possible to revise literary history and, even, better, to complement it.

Combining unrelated aspects lead to surprising analogies these piece appear as dreamlike images in which fiction and reality meet, well-known tropes merge, meanings shift, past and present fuse. Time and memory always play a key role. In a search for new methods to ‘read the city’, the texts reference post-colonial theory as well as the avant-garde or the post-modern and the left-wing democratic movement as a form of resistance against the logic of the capitalist market system.

Many of the works are about contact with architecture and basic living elements. Energy (heat, light, water), space and landscape are examined in less obvious ways and sometimes develop in absurd ways. By creating situations and breaking the passivity of the spectator, he tries to develop forms that do not follow logical criteria, but are based only on subjective associations and formal parallels, which incite the viewer to make new personal associations. These pieces demonstrate how life extends beyond its own subjective limits and often tells a story about the effects of global cultural interaction over the latter half of the twentieth century. It challenges the binaries we continually reconstruct between Self and Other, between our own ‘cannibal’ and ‘civilized’ selves. Enjoy!

Rockets! Geoffrey Gatza, editor

Poetry

Poetry Extra Extra

Bumblebees : A Poetry Chapbook by Deborah Meadows, Illustrations by Geoffrey Gatza

Micro-poem co-translations of the Korean Buddhist monk Ch’oŭi (1786-1866)
Translated by Ian Haight and T’ae-yong Hŏ.

Creative Non-fiction

Girls! Girls! Girls! — Shelley Stoehr

Text Art

Bruno Neiva — 3 Nods to Robert Grenier, 2021
David Felix — 3 Visual Poems
hiromi suzuki — Xerox Fancy Car
Mark Young — 6 Visual Poems
Nicholas Alexander Hayes — Servants in Protection
Pamela Miller — 5 Visual Poems

Fiction

Year 2000 Problem — John Tavares
The Elements of Fiction — Ethan Goffman
Ruination — J.L. Moultrie
Present Now — Lohren Green
The Apocryphal Deaths — Marc Lerner
Miracle at St. Ann Four Screen — William Pruitt
Children’s Clinic — Zary Fekete
Dark Mind — L. Sydney Abel
Through the Glass — Pete Prokesch
Detours — Jacob McShane

BlazeVOX22-Spring22 by BlazeVOX [books] on Scribd