BlazeVOX13 Fall 2013

IntroductionIntroduction

Clarissa Grunwald | Elysium

Benjamin Rader | An Evening Special | Lucid Phrases

Allison Talucci | Apology

Elizabeth Alexander | Transpositions

Kailyn McCord | Transcript #2951

Sheikh Saaliq | The ‘Hanging’

Tariq Shah | Felix and Pauly

Joan Fiset | White Streak

M. E. McMullen | Desperate Horseflies

Megan Schikora | The Paris Problem

Jennifer Lesh | The Vineyard

Rudy Ravindra | Pandora’s Box

Sonia Saraiya | West Indies

Derek J. Douglas | Anchors Aweigh

Danielle Brawand | The Toe Sucker

• Acta Biographia – Author Bios 

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READ THE WHOLE ISSUE HERE

BlazeVOX13 FALL 2013 an Online Journal of Voice

MORPHEUS: A Bildungsroman by John Kinsella

“A lyrical tour de force.  Literate, impassioned and often downright gorgeous, the prose sings with wit and vigor.  Add a little Dr. Benway to Stephen Dedalus, with a touch of Genet’s Divine, and you have a glimpse of Kinsella’s Thomas Icarus Napoleon, the hero of this literary drama.  Awesome.” 

—Jeffrey Deshell, author of Arthouse (FC2) and The Trouble with Being Born (FC2)

Oops! Environmental Poetics by James Sherry

What poetry can change is the will to change. James Sherry finds “real correspondence” between poetry’s conditional truths and the great out there, and he definitively places poetry at the center of our being-in-ecology. For a beautifully detailed understanding of poetry’s possibilities in apprehending the deep bonds, niches and connections of us-we-there-them-where-here, read Oops!. 

–Marcella Durand, author of Traffic & Weather

BRUSHES WITH by Kristina Marie Darling

Some facts: there is “white residue” on a windowsill. In a novel on the brink of being written, someone walks out the door then reappears on the edge of a lake. To “recollect.” To “glide.” To “wake up.” In a work that is reminiscent of Jenny Boully’s The Body — a blankness accompanied by footnotes — Darling’s Brushes with performs a narrative of sexual betrayal and peculiar [excruciating] loss with a delicate and pressing hand. In the appendix that closes the collection, the “interior of a burned house” is transposed with the figure of a sky filled with “dead stars.” Is the heart a burial ground for domestic desires? Darling has written a work of caked trace in which the longing for a shared world is already a part of the counterfeit, damaged and “circling” past. Trace, in other words, does not function in the usual way. It is not light. It is not something you can look through, like holding an ice shard up to the sun. On the contrary, it is “unsightly.” It is a dark weight in a little book that felt, at times, like an act of beautiful revenge.

—Bhanu Kapil, author of Humanimal

The Unfinished by Mark DuCharme

Mark DuCharme’s beautiful poems teach us to read all over again: mystery, the situation of person, the texture of dream and the texture of awareness: The Unfinished is a tough book, a necessary book.

—Joseph Lease

Truth Game by Tom Clark

On Tom Clark’s poetry:

“Very exciting… The poems have the ‘now’ sound of current experience; they enable one to see a little further into life as it’s presently being lived.” — John Ashbery

for Holding Silence by Nura Yingling

Yingling’s poems in for Holding Silence map the direction out of Lost up each scouring step to Found, or at least to the essential human truth that “the woman who could be you, is.” Rigorously raw and personal, they yet show us ourselves —in spite of all the wily ways we try to avoid such mirrors—with music, vision, and great compassion. “No need anymore for efforting,” she discovers in Eleven, “Here in weightless stillness is what/ you’ve always wanted.” Human poems opening out and up. — Sheryl Robbins

Does the Moon Ever Shine in Heaven? by Chuck Richardson

In Does the Moon Ever Shine in Heaven? Chuck Richardson sends Dostoekvsky’s Notes From Underground into the information age: angst goes surreal, beyond identity, meets pop culture in the form of Captain Beefheart, Diane Sawyer, Ayn Ran, Michael Corleone and the beat goes on. A rampaging rip of a book that throws all expectation out the window—including normality itself. If you can handle the raucousness Richardson throws your way, you will laugh out loud. I did. —Jefferson Hansen is the author of a book of poetry, Jazz Forms (Blue Lion), plus a novel …and beefheart saved craig (BlazeVOX). He edits AlteredScale.com.

Flux by Jane Joritz-Nakagawa

In Jane Joritz-Nakagawa’s FLUX, we encounter a poetic temperament equally at home in the openness of the personal lyric and the laser-sharp probe of social commentary. In her dexterous handling of lineation and compression, the poems oscillate— challenging us to reconsider just about everything we hold dear. Some things, as she says, cannot be translated; yet, with the help of these poems, we are better prepared for what the strange world offers us.

—JENNIFER WALLACE

Transversales by Michael Gessner

The poems in Michael Gessner’s new collection, Transversales, are formally dazzling—incisive, witty, and smart—but compassion tempers linguistic brilliance. In a series set in Paris, for instance, a visit (against advice) to the “labyrinth of tented markets,” the now-dangerous Market of Seine-Saint-Denis, is punctuated dramatically by fragmented quotations from Victor Hugo’s diary kept during the siege of Paris (1871). Quite simply, I am hooked on this book. Gessner’s poems are glory.

—Cynthia Hogue, author of Or Consequence

Robert Browning’s The Pied Piper of Hamelin, A Child’s Story

This facsimile of Robert Browning’s The Pied Piper of Hamelin, A Child’s Story is beautifully illustrated and colored by T. W. Craik and W. A. Craik. BlazeVOX presents for the first time this wonderful edition, originally created in 1959 as a gift by the illustrators to their young son. Robert Browning’s poem captures the mysterious nature of the Piper legend and the resplendent, rich time period in which the tale took place, which has inspired many great illustrators such as Kate Greenaway, Arthur Rackham, Margaret Tarant, and Maxfield Parrish. The dramatic events that Browning recorded in 1842 marvelously unfold in the Craiks‘ illustrations. The pages have bold, imaginative drawings, deep lines, rich colors and fine (often idiosyncratic) details. From the pillaging rats to the gluttonous council members, every pen and brush stroke brings Browning’s moral home. This work contains over 40 illustrated pages with hand lettering and includes a foreword by Roger Craik detailing this book’s creation by his parents. This unique book is intended for all ages.