BlazeVOX15 Spring 2015

I have been sitting at my desk typing away on my large screened apple computer dreading what I am about to write. BlazeVOX is now in its 15^th year of operation. We have great moments to look back upon in our history, as well as some moments that bear careful consideration. It seems incredible to me that we are not merely still in operation we are vividly alive!

The BlazeVOX journal developed out of a Daemen College arts journal that was published exclusively online; in 1999 that was a radical thing to do. But today happily, an online journal is the norm.

In 2000 BlazeVOX was born as an online journal from a computer that I used in the college computer lab. I did not have a PC in my home. After a summer of hard work, our first issue was released in the fall. We have had a continual run ever since. We have a full archive of all our back-issues on our webpage; so do spend some time flipping though the 15 years of BlazeVOX an.journal.of.voice.

As I look back at the time that has passed I am enthusiastic, even though an irksome form of nostalgia bothers me. In an effort to alleviate these feelings I decided to create a mundane list poem to parse out what occurred during this time. I appropriated news headlines from the past fifteen years in order to make a small, easy-going poem to chuckle over. However, when the piece was complete, that poem turned into 70 pages of compelling half-memories, or I should say memories that provoked memories of things that I did experienced while news was happening around journalism. As we wrote poetry a lot of life happened. Have a look for yourself:

To commemorate who we are at 15 we plan to celebrate. We are planning to have some special events throughout the year. We plan to have readings, videos and even a party sometime in the fall. Keep an eye out for your invitation it will be a year to revel!

And before I go, I would like to thank you all for your wonderful support over the years. You are an important part this press and your help makes a real difference in getting innovative works by undervalued writers read worldwide. Your act of reading our work is incredibly helpful means so much to me but even more to BlazeVOX authors whose work might not see the light of day without your giving us a part of your time, a part of your day! We thank you a thousand times.

A’s Visuality by Anne Gorrick

This is the work of a highly-engaged intelligence, and Gorrick has made her own system by moving through the world with the given that this, too, is poetry. —Carolyn Guinzio

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Against Misanthropy, A Life in Poetry (2015-1995) by Eileen R. Tabios

2015 marks the 20th year anniversary of Eileen R. Tabios’ “career switch” from banking to poetry. AGAINST MISANTHROPY presents her life as a self-educated poet—from, as a newbie poet, reading through all of the poetry books of her local Barnes and Noble as she scratched her head over what poetry is supposed to be … to more recently creating a poetry generator capable of making poems without additional authorial intervention.

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An Argument of Roots by Cornelia Veenendaal

 

His This extra-ordinary poet is at once companionable with the natural world and wonderfully awake to the daily surprises of the city; a poet who is almost painfully attuned to the beauty that sustains us and mindful of the terrors that threaten to fell us. —Marie Harris; NH Poet Laureate, 1999-2004

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DRINK By Laura Madeline Wiseman 

Witty, sad, tragic, and magical, the poems in Drink both rewrite myths of the sea and present a harrowing vision of a childhood fraught with abuse, alcoholism, and poverty.  —Nin Andrews

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Going With The Flow by Peter Siedlecki 

With wry honesty and impressive skill, Peter Siedlecki contemplates aging and what will follow it. —Joan Murray

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K- A 21st Century Canzoniere by I Goldfarb 

Goldfarb makes Dante’s platonic love sensible—his use of the Muse indispensable. If “Muse” is in both “amuse” and “museum,” the work passes muster with both.—Andrei Codrescu

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Metamericana by Seth Abramson

“America has been awaiting the arrival of a poet like this for a generation.” —Barn Owl Review

“A major American voice.” —Colorado Review

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Minnows Small as Sixteenth Notes- The Collected Poems of Norma Kassirer 

Your belief in transcendent linguistic delight may have faded long ago but Norma Kassirer’s inexhaustible poetic universe will never fail to change you. … Read her and live. ––Janet Kaplan

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Scorched Altar- Selected Poems & Stories By Kristina Marie Darling

It is in the very restlessness of her metaphors that Kristina Darling documents a tangible faith. Such restlessness is trustworthy and always, throughout Scorched Altar, both vital and in plain view. Here are truthful experiments. Here is a new tradition, alive in bright air. —Donald Revell

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Showgirls— The Movie in Sestinas by Jeffery Conway

Calling to the stage the gold-glittered divas of Showgirls, Conway uses the sestina’s circular dance to celebrate each frame of cinema’s campiest of stripper films. —Daniel Nester

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Starlight- 150 Poems by John Tranter 

This is one poetry book you will want to keep reading! —Rae Armantrout

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The Arctic Circle by Kristina Marie Darling 

Two brides crystalize into one entity then split, climatic conditions echo and advance deeply lodged psycho-somatic realities—The Arctic Circle is a cautionary tale about flawed repetition and imprisoned categories of sex. —Brenda Iijima

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Those Godawful Streets of Man by Stephen Bett

“This is an edgy, raw, harsh, gritty book about the contemporary cityscape—its block buildings; its loose, naked, spitting live wires; its plugged-in populace. A place where Borderliners, leeches, zombies, and drains fight it out over a man and a woman locked in a death grip.”

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Three Plays by Deborah Meadows

Are these Three Plays really one play along a topological fold?

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Two Books on the Gas—Above the Shale and Achieved by Kissing By Jared Schickling 

In these Two Books on The Gas, Schickling engages us with a scintillating exploration of how the affective waste need not be merely contained and managed, but how it can be projected out—away towards a new Human Chronos of Possibility. —Rodrigo Toscano

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