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BlazeVOX16 Fall 2016

IntroductionIntroduction

Hello and welcome to the Fall issue of BlazeVOX 16. 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 developed 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

Table of Contents
 
Poetry
 
 
 
Fiction
 
Christien Gholson — Selling Magazines to the Joneses
Christine Andrada Henley — dry rubbing against
Dan Frazier — Flash
Patrick Chapman — The Rocket Curator
Sarah Estime — The Co.
Bridget McFadden — Bedtime Routine
August Evans— For Lorne
Skylar Abdeljalil — The Wing Collector
Whe Foedisch — Wooster
Frances Wiese — A Beautiful Joke
 
Text Art
 
hiromi suzuki  — Fugue
David Felix — Three Works
 

Creative Non-Fiction

 
Jake McCulley — Apophenia
Virs Rana —  A PICTURE’S WORTH…
 
 
Acta Biographia — Author Biographies

BlazeVOX16 – Fall 2016 an.online.journal.of.voice

 

New Releases from BlazeVOX books

 

 

The Solace of Islands by Ansie Baird

“Scanning the dark” is often what Ansie Baird is doing in this rich new collection of poems that open into emotional terrain in which her only compass is a mix of intelligence, clear-sightedness, and the power of exact articulation. These new poems chart a lifetime’s emotional journey–open to pathos, humor, and above all compassionate understanding.  —Eamon Grennan
 
Seth Abramson is author of The Metamodern Trilogy, which includes Golden Age (2017), DATA (2016), and Metamericana (2015), all published by BlazeVOX. He is also the author of The Insider’s Guide to Graduate Creative Writing Degrees (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2018); Thievery, winner of the Akron Poetry Prize (University of Akron Press, 2013); Northerners, winner of the Green Rose Prize (New Issues/Western Michigan University Press, 2011); and The Suburban Ecstasies (Ghost Road Press, 2009).
 
In a note that accompanies And Others, Vaguer Presences, the most recent collection of erasures by David Dodd Lee, he uses the phrase, “the poem wanting what the poem wants.” This statement curiously corroborates my impression that these poems were actually written by the poems themselves, which had definite ideas about what they wanted and didn’t want. It’s a strange feeling, being twice removed from one’s poems, strange and refreshing. I highly recommend Lee’s version of the poems’ poems. —John Ashbery
 
“A brilliant and disturbing masterpiece—an unpicking of elegy and its inevitable entanglements with ‘autobiography.’ Its expression is supra-active and fast paced. It scans form and implications of the living and the dead. It exhumes and lays to rest. It left me stunned.” —John Kinsella
 
Descent of the Dolls Part I
by Jeffery Conway, Gillian McCain, and David Trinidad
Dante’s Inferno meets the 1967 movie Valley of the Dolls in this collaborative descent into a Hollywood camp classic. Over ten years in the writing, the first installment of this epic poetic conversation sees poets Jeffery Conway, Gillian McCain, and David Trinidad pair up with their respective Virgil-esque guides: Frank O’Hara, Sharon Tate, and Anne Sexton. Our three poets follow the film’s heroines—Anne, Neely, and Jennifer—backstage into the murky circles of Showbiz and PoBiz.
 
A strikingly original voice in New American poetry—intelligent and wide-ranging: a questioner, a rememberer and a myth-weilder on a par with Olson, Dorn, Duncan,—in short, a discovery waiting to happen. Now is your chance to make it happen for you. —Jesse Glass
 
“Attraction has its pulls,” writes Michael Kelleher. Museum Hours maps, in moving ways, the force of gravity that art has on our lives, our attentions. One trusts the secrets that Kelleher’s poems share. With their precision, their quietness, their frequently keen but subtle wit, these poems enter the ear and the mind as intimately as a sudden sense of wonder just before “the roof gives way to the stars.”  —Richard Deming, Yale University
 
“‘Dark Shadows made me believe // in a world of paranormal certainty,’ and after you read this book, you will too. Tony Trigilio writes a world in which there is no separation between his dailiness and the fictional realm of Dark Shadows, the supernatural soap opera he clearly loves, even with its daily rash of continuity errors, bad makeup, flubbed lines, and inherent camp, a show that has possessed him since he first watched it as a child with his mother.” (Nick Twemlow).
 
Robert Gibbons’s new collection of poems lays bare the vast expanse of human history as a widening landscape of the most august imagination. Gibbons, a born maximalist, carries Charles Olson’s excavations into the present tense, but does so in his own measure of music, personal and specific, yet universal and inclusive. Animated Landscape never forgets history is not a then, but always now, always all around us. —Richard Deming, Director of Creative Writing, Yale University
 
Fantastic Caryatids, by Anne Waldman & Vincent Katz, is a lush, vivid and spectacular reading/album/book of poetry, conversation and photographs. Note that the subtitle is A Conversation with Art. The with has the particularities of city, specificities of the senses, of memories, of an ethos whose upper limit is friendship, companionship.  …  Well, you get the picture: “Form is love.” You don’t want to miss this! —Norma Cole
 
When I discovered Masiela Lusha’s impressive list of accomplishments in the cinematic arts, I have to say I was not surprised in the least. Ms. Lusha’s poems skillfully dramatize the most ethereal of philosophical ideas, showing us what’s at stake as we “stalk the truth.” This book will invite you in, then “release you as a learner,” subtly illuminating through its performative poetics what questions we should be asking of the world around us.  —Kristina Marie Darling
 
Finally: a posthuman translation of Shakespeare. I’m glad Daniel Y. Harris beat Watson at it. There are still large chunks of human in his kind lineation.” —Andrei Codrescu, author of Bibliodeath: My Archives (with Life in Footnotes)
 
Diana S. Adams’ To The River, is a delicious novella – the first of a trilogy – that is both resolutely gritty and often magical. It’s a wonderful, modern-day exploration of urban life, with characters who stick to the ribs and travel well past the final pages. Adams is a spare, clear-eyed and fearless writer who wades into the lives of her characters and reveals just enough to give them perfect breath. A mere glimpse of a character in an Adams’ novella is full meal – with wine, dessert and an espresso. She reveals the right flavours and readers come away with a full understanding, complete with unanswered questions.
 
 
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