SMEAR by Andrew Brenza

Kristine Snodgrass: Guided by intuition (looking at the final product, how is this possible?), Andrew Brenza’s work implodes and tumbles with gorgeous black holes and visual fields in the tradition of visual poetics. SMEAR deftly combines the disabled rhetoric of a new American fascism (Trump’s Twitter) with refrains construed and constructed from past inaugural addresses. Reading this on the day of the inauguration of the new president confirms to me that Brenza has tapped into a collective psyche of exhaustion and confusion, melded into the salience of visual art which Brenza defines as “collapsed”, “layered”, and “cynical prognostications”—some of the most striking and gorgeous concrete poems I have seen. We ask, what is the type-face without the original semantic construction? How much does Brenza control the eye from entering any meaning? I think this work, unlike much I have seen lately, is poly and para, unfurling and bearing with, not for, the reader.

Rachel Blau Duplessis, author of Poetic Realism: Working with strong page-making skills in modes of visual and procedural poetry, Andrew Brenza’s serious work comments on the tearing up and uneasy reconfiguring of languages in our historical moment. He creatively transforms inaugural addresses of all U.S. Presidents: imploded, exploded, spun to whirlpool, in a “jagged maw” or “transforming into a broken vapor.” At the end, “Acts of Domestic Terror” balls letters up into dark cells, crossing allegory and image, creating posters of anxious commentary in distinctive graphic art.

Orchid Tierney, author of Ocean Plastic: Andrew Brenza is an inventive visual architect of the English language. His collection Smear brings to the fore a literal and figurative smudging of classification and sharply smashes the received assumptions of the naturalness of American political rhetoric. Whether it is in the manipulations of inaugural presidential speeches or the anagrammatic torqueing of Trumpian tweets, these visual poems mobilize the materiality of linguistic resistance and wit. I love the transmutability of his poetic language and the entrancing forms he generates. This collection is a bold delight!

Nico Vassilakis: What’s a smear, but a blur, a smudge. A truth that’s been sullied. In his collection, Brenza reveals a smear via the poetic obfuscation of historical inventory. How did one tolerate the 45th American president? In this case with typographic dalliance and anagramic mayhem. Brenza utilizes erasure, overtyping, monolithic space seeds and other playfully typed arrangements to convey an object out of his subjects. He offers an array of concrete/visual poetry motifs to deftly repurpose a parade of presidential inaugural addresses. Yep, I said it. This book adds to the genre nicely.

De Villo Sloan: Brenza readers will find an essential addition of stunning new neo-concrete material in Smear that contributes significantly to his growing body of work. Many visual poets have abandoned text in favor of raw image. Brenza places image-text at the center of his poetics, and Smear is given even greater cohesion and depth through its ambitious use of appropriated political discourse. This book is an essential read for Andrew Brenza fans and those following the evolution of visual poetry.

Andrew Brenza is an American experimental poet and librarian. His recent chapbooks include under a digital sky (Trainwreck Press, 2020), Poems in C (Viktlösheten Press, 2019), and Bitter Almonds & Mown Grass (Shirt Pocket Press, 2018). He is also the author of four full-length collections of visual poetry, most recently, Automatic Souls (2020) from Timglaset Editions and Alphabeticon & Other Poems (2020) from Redfoxpress.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 128 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-383-6

$18

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