BlazeVOX16 Spring 2016

IntroductionIntroduction

Hello and welcome to the Spring 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!

Tank & Max Do America: Part 1 by K.E. Mahoney

Is It A Crime? by Tarice L.S. Gray

The Secrets That an ESL Teacher Keeps by Natasha Deveau

Chapter One by Caroline Allen

BlazeVOX16 – Spring 16

New Releases from BlazeVOX Books

Notes on a Past Life
by David Trinidad

This reader was depressed by the rancorous settling of scores but exalted by the homage paid to the great dead—a record of lived life, every second of it, and a love letter to New York (a letter written after a disappointing but gripping affair). —Edmund White

Hitching Post
by Nava Fader

Nava Fader’s Hitching Post is a collage of wild horses willingly let loose from the domesticity of language. Fader, who pays tribute to Michael Basinski’s Trailers vis-à-vis the titles of her poems, breathes life into voiceless scenes and animates the everyday. Nothing is tied down to this hitching post – not even Fader, the equestrian – who leaves us with remnants of galloping rhythms and untamed echoes.—Morani Kornberg-Weiss, author of Dear Darwish

An Apparently Impossible Adventure
by Laura Madeline Wiseman

Laura Madeline Wiseman’s prose is razor-sharp, cutting through all the falsities we cling to, exposing us all hiding beneath the masks we wear, exposing our wounds, our wandering frailties, all that we sidestep, and most deeply, exposing the ‘mists that divide.’ An Apparently Impossible Adventure is a stunning read.
—Karen Stefano, author of The Secret Games of Words

Virtual Worlds Virtual People
by Kay Porter Winfield

Poetry and video games don’t often occupy the same space at the same time, but Kay Porter Winfield’s Virtual Worlds Virtual People proves once and for all that they can (and maybe they should). This book is a cathartic reminder that reading is one of the oldest video games of all, but also that the virtual worlds and people we encounter in play are sometimes more real to us than we are to ourselves. —Matt Hart

The Age of Greenhouses
by Anne-Adele Wight

The mash-up of our ecological and moral concerns may be navigating by “a map so changed by three million years that spare parts no longer apply.” Anne-Adele Wight’s gardens now stand in for that map; our labyrinth lost, our plague clue, our rumored history, our “heaven and hell”––but for how long? Forget what gardens are for in your patent metaphysical realm; “everything is a palindrome or nothing is.” —Edric Mesmer

DATA
by Seth Abramson

BROWN – EYED POLISH
5’8.602” MASSHOLE
FLATFOOTED HAIRY
SKIN-TAGGED RUSSIAN

Six Short Plays
by John Matthias

“Well! I asked the girls and learned that this Mr. Matthias was no fly-by-night Johnny, no film flam man on the lam from the clink or the Studebaker plant at South Bend, Indiana, but the real thing, a prime mover and a shaker, too, top drawer, top dollar, the dropped banana, the silk drawers, the smoking jacket, the clinamen, the Paralete, the parakeet and the parachute.” —Joyelle McSweeney

No Dimes for the Dancing Gypsies
by Linda King

In No Dimes for the Dancing Gypsies, Linda King masterfully orchestrates an intriguing & mesmerizing work of identity and survival. These are poems of inquiry, poems of resurrection, where “water has a memory” and language reveals “other dichotomies,” where the past and present merge, and language beautifully triumphs. —Marcia Arrieta

Ghost / Landscape
by Kristina Marie Darling and John Gallaher

GHOST / LANDSCAPE reads like an intimate chat, except not the kind people have over tea. Maybe it’s whiskey causing these emotional flare-ups … The chemistry between these poets is electric; it lights up the page. —Diana Spechler

The Woman with a Million Hearts
by Loren Kleinman

A new genre, perhaps more poetry than memoir, Loren Kleinman’s A WOMAN WITH A MILLION HEARTS is a story of an inner life beautifully rendered. The life events that elicit these short pieces belong to the body rather than the mind, and fade in and out, sometimes hinting, sometimes revealing, as if they are happening inside out. —Lynda Schor

The Writers’ Circle
and Other Stories
by Michael Gessner

In this stunning collection Michael Gessner pays full attention to the marginal and the marginalized –– whether unwashed, rejected, condemned, or simply unusual –– and brilliantly inhabits them, evoking their passions, their yearnings, and also the rare strands of hope that sustain and illuminate. —Grace Dane Mazur