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IntroductionIntroduction
Hello and welcome to the Fall issue of BlazeVOX 15. Presenting fine works of poetry, fiction, text art, visual poetry and arresting works of creative non-fiction written by authors from around world. Also presented are previews of our newly released books of poetry and fiction. 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!Happy Fifteenth Anniversary
Hip Hip Hurray!:
Rockets! Geoffrey Gatza, editor
New Releases from BlazeVOX [books]
Fire For Thought by Reed Bye
The mind may move faster than the hand can write but Reed Bye’s poems capture the dictates of thought as processed by the conspiratorial and wandering eye, all the light and shadow of the natural world, the peripheral glimpses of people and places where few poets ever go. Lucid, abstract, impulsive, beyond the pale—Fire For Thought is both a summing up and a starting over—“what seems to be necessity,” and something much more. —Lewis Warsh
Marine Layer By Kit Robinson
Kit Robinson convects his frontal systems through Marine Layer, happy to be enveloped in its fog while somehow always letting its poems breathe. Information sizzles in these data dispatches from the twenty-first century: poetry as a news feed that knows just enough to trust what happens next, lifting the fog—for us all—on the movable things of song. —Miles Champion
The Last Place I Lived by K. Alma Peterson
In this deeply textured book, K. Alma Peterson’s playful, brilliant language counterpoints very serious matter—the blunt fissures of survival and pain, creating a tension and energy that drives these poems. They might feel like sleight of hand but are really transformative, like alchemy. She sums it up best herself: “…straddling the gap between tame/art and reckless science, they play dangerously//turning experimentation into evidence…” (Trains Derail in the Deepest Woods and We Take Positions We Cannot Defend.) It is stunning work, and it makes you want to sing. — John Minczeski, author of A Letter to Serafin, University of Akron Press
Whatever Speaks on Behalf of Hashish by Anis Shivani
“Startlingly fecund, culturally shrewd, grounded in bright particulars and sly juxtapositions, Anis Shivani shows us with diamond brilliance what happens when language takes leave of its day job to exult in its real power. No longer the bean counter of ordinary doings, it becomes its own freedom, conscious of itself as beacon of what we could achieve, were we to realize the wisdom of Emerson’s remark that the ultimate American trope is surprise.” — David Rigsbee
Women and Ghosts by Kristina Marie Darling
Women and Ghosts is a book for the brokenhearted: “Iced over with sadness,” its speaker says (or doesn’t), “I can no longer speak.” In ghost text stricken from the record, she also says (or doesn’t): “I wonder how someone else’s life can seem so much my own.” She means Desdemona’s. Ophelia’s. Juliet’s. Cleopatra’s. Lavinia’s. But when I read these words, I think: not theirs, hers — I wonder how her life can seem so much my own. I love this book. I honor it. I cherish it. —Molly Gaudry
archipelago counterpoint By Marcia Arrieta
With Arrieta’s poetry, we’re left on the edge of understanding how to connect beautiful fragments. Her lyrical poems play with sound, meaning, line break, and form….she searches in archipelago counterpoint for a way to combine the disjunctive with the personal, the tentative direction with the story, and the results are poems that linger evocatively in one’s own words. —William Allegrezza
Limitless Tiny Boat by Ruth Danon
By investigating the minutiae of life—the stuff that anchors us, a stone and its echo, paradoxes constructed by language—Ruth Danon investigates nothing short of Thanatos and Eros. The journey of the Limitless, Tiny Boat is fierce and fearless. Watch out! These poems expand and contract—breathe—as they are read. A substantial achievement. —Martine Bellen
Biennial: Poems by Michael Joyce
these poems split the seconds of daily life
into splinters that, with time, catch the light
—Charles Bernstein
Nine by Anne Tardos
“What glee in the Nine, this tour de force of genius trickster complexity, “all about equipping poetry.” And Anne Tardos does this accouterment-ing like a Buddhist deity with many arms and heads. “Rub together two neurons and you have a mind” and play with nines and you have a rich compendium of unsurpassed wild multi-lingual-mental invention and words stomping around as richly palpable (non gendered!) masters of the universe. I got so refreshed by the wit and tenderness I couldn’t stop. —Anne Waldman
Rain Check Poems by Aaron Simon
Aaron Simon’s lines feel like strokes of a pre-CBS Jazzmaster. Not plastic. More like rosewood with at least a Gibson tuneOmatic bridge. A brrruummm alliteration where each word-note contains the artful play of improv and composition colliding. Aaron Simon is a good band whose record is killing it on the deck these days.—Thurston Moore
Little: Novels by Emily Anderson
I can’t remember the last time I read something so familiar and unsettling–like meeting someone you love after they come back from a long journey wearing differently-colored eyes. Like if H.P. Lovecraft had had a hand in writing The Book of Common Prayer. It’s playful, and frightening, and truer, somehow, than the original. —Mallory Ortberg, Texts from Jane Eyre
Nectar of Story By Tim J. Myers
“Nectar of Story considers wildly various, ever intriguing subjects with sympathy, passion, and self-effacing wisdom. And his prose introductions to the poems are often as fine as the vignettes in Hemingway’s In Our Time. A rich and wonderful collection.” —Ron Hansen
Patient Women by Larissa Shmailo
Larissa Shmailo’s Patient Women tells the story of Nora, a gifted young woman who comes of age in New York against heavy odds. Her Russian mother is demanding; the young men around her are uncaring; and her dependence on drink and sex leads her to a shadowy life filled with self-made demons. Yet Nora’s intelligence pulls her through the difficult times—there are even moments of (very) dark humor here. As well, an appendix of poems attributed to Nora lets us into the corners of her heart and mind. —Thaddeus Rutkowski, author of Haywire
The Slip by George Tysh
His engagement with the variable foot of William Carlos Williams gives a new spring and all to George Tysh’s remarkable collection The Slip. For much of the book, especially the haunting title poem, an isolated phrase appears, then the next descends, and then another, each open space miming the way breath appears in human speech, as an aid to understanding and an absolute electric charge—at times one of volcanic intensity. … And my God, so beautiful. —Kevin Killian
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