BlazeVOX17 Spring 2017

IntroductionIntroduction

Hello and welcome to the Spring issue of BlazeVOX 17. 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!

BlazeVOX 17 | an online journal of voice | Spring 2017

New Releases from BlazeVOX books

Dead Ringer by Charles Borkhuis

In this darkly introspective poetry, inner and outer, self and other, past and present
bleed together. Dead Ringer is an unforgettable volume of indelible palimpsests. —Tom Beckett

The Distancing Effect by Maryam Monalisa Gharavi

A beautifully tangled collection of poems that reveal an intense focus on the world, not as a singular philosophical phenomenon but a series of sensual encounters that always seem to be on the verge of revelation. —Michael Thomsen

Stone by Naomi Buck Palagi

In Buck Palagi’s Stone, the words are pulled from the ground, vivid and durable—poetic stones of memory and contemplation. The words in this first book signal a fully formed poet we surely need to follow. —William Allegrezza

The Olfactions: Poems on Perfume by Anne Gorrick

These are the finest closed, non-orientable, boundary-free manifolds sold anywhere in our three spatial dimensions. —John Bloomberg-Rissman, poet

Heisenberg’s Salon by Susan Lewis

Tiny stories, or large poems, Susan Lewis’s writing features exacting, figurative frames, windows in which glimpses of oneself are prismy, apposed by some other real—allegory—sounded in language’s slanted order (ardor?—(yes)). —Dale Smith

Her Body Listening by Cheryl Pallant

In this lovely volume, Pallant suffuses sentience with Vision. “She knows to unknow what’s been told”. Reminiscent of the reachingly brilliant works of Leonor Fini , these poems unite the oddity of occupying a body, miraculous yet nevertheless aware of one’s self-awareness, in a subtle “out of body” listening of great learning. —Lissa Wolsak

The Absence Of The Loved by Wade Stevenson

Stevenson offers some striking and effective images for romantic love… These poems effectively convey heartbreak’s anguish.” —Kirkus Reviews

Die Die Dinosaur by Michael Sikkema

In Die Die Dinosaur, maggots perhaps foretell the future and a political candidate might get their throat slit with a spam lid. —Jennifer MacBain-Stephens

Wave Particle Duality by Dana Curtis

In Wave Particle Duality, Dana Curtis takes us into her nocturnal sphere, the film noir where fission splits the soul, and dark energy is all we have to go on. These are poems full of twisted desire and visionary clarity, pure need and thin hope. —David Lazar

Through a Certain Forest by Laura Madeline Wiseman

We are given a field guide to trees in Laura Madeline Wiseman’s latest book of poetry Through a Certain Forest, realizing as we step in that we are deep in the mythos of ourselves. Each poem is a persona, each tree species recounting its survival from humans. —Dennis Etzel, Jr., author of My Secret Wars of 1984