BlazeVOX18 Fall 2018

IntroductionIntroduction

Hello and welcome to the Fall issue of BlazeVOX 18. 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 pieces 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 essential 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, 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 individual 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!

BlazeVOX18 – Fall 2018 by BlazeVOX [books]

New and Forthcoming from BlazeVOX [books]

Five Sequences For The Country At Night by Mike Perrow

These poems are witty and mysterious, ethereal but deeply rooted in the earth. Mike Perrow’s ear is finely attuned to the sounds inside a word, evoking the gentle hum of the rural South, as well as the lilt and swing of Harlem jazz. “Light obsessed,” he knows about Charlie Parker’s saxophone, the behavior of the brightest points in the night sky, and the dangerous appetites of numbers. —Lynne Potts

The Tryst of Thetica Zorg, Volume II: The Posthuman Series by Daniel Y. Harris

At once timestamped and timeless, Daniel Y. Harris collapses technology and theology into a dense Trojan horse / Trojan virus of a poem. By siphoning the modernisms of Arno Schmidt, Maurice Roche, and James Joyce through the digital, Harris exquisitely extends the discourse of endless textuality into the twenty-first century. Astonishingly original and shockingly new, lovers of experimental literature will celebrate this monumental achievement. —Kenneth Goldsmith

declivities by Irene Koronas

Irene Koronas’ declivities, Volume III of her Grammaton Series, along with ninth iota (The Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2018) and Codify (Editions du Cygne, 2017), seals her position as one of the most ingenious, experimental innovators of our era. She is a postlanguage, hyper-minimalist écrivain, melding the aporias of a posthuman poesis with an orthodox spiritus.

Outside/Inside Just outside the art world’s inside by Martha King

I’ve just finished with this splendid memoir. It has so much life to it, and brio, and so much deeply felt reflection that I’m hooked. I loved hearing about everything! The picture of San Francisco life at a certain moment in the mid-fifties has not been equaled elsewhere…but the Lucia Berlin chapter was to me the emblem of all the rest—a long look, with a hundred cunningly observed details, that builds to an heroic thesis. —Kevin Killian

Madstones by Corey Mesler

“These poems– at times dark and troubling, at other times passionate and openhearted–are the work of a very talented poet. Madstones is a book worthy of a smart and attentive audience.” —Ron Rash, author of Serena and Above the Waterfall

Ten by Jennifer Firestone

Using her recovering body as a constraint for poetic inspiration, Jennifer Firestone has written poems that are limpid, elemental, tranquil, and full of light. —Cathy Park Hong

Parables For The Pouring Rain by Paul Sutton

“I marvel at Paul Sutton’s unique ability to confront the demons of our time and to beat them at their own game – the game of words. His poetry is a subtle affront to the censorship around us. His speech is more than simply free.” — Ewan Morrison

sound of wave in channel, Books I and II by Stephen Ratcliffe

In Stephen Ratcliffe’s sound of wave in channel, constant difference meets constant sameness. The result is a sublime evanescence, where the daily practice of poetry becomes a means of making palpable the immanent transcendence that Dickinson called “Finite infinity.” —Charles Bernstein

A Mountain Of Past Lives & Things I’ve Learned by Skyler Jaye

“Each of the Past-lives, each written into a Mountain its own, also seems to fit into an open hand. I found myself snapping and ooo-ing and mmm-ing along because even black on white paper, the words take a stage.” —Ashley Wylde

Guides, Translators, Assistants, Porters by Jared Schickling

…dense thickets… detritus… unforgiving… tension… (DB); …violence… ashes… open… mirror… (LS)

What a Bicycle Can Carry by Laura Madeline Wiseman

Laura Madeline Wiseman’s What a Bicycle Can Carry shows the beauty that can be made by attending to what’s been disregarded, overlooked, and cast off. Though the structure of the book – a trek across America by bicycle, with sections giving the names of states and poems defined by the day of the trip and the miles covered – may seem straightforward, the book probes a deeper interior journey. —Nancy Reddy, author of Acadiana

The Mouth Of The Bay by Michael Ruby

In poems written on the rocky coast at the mouth of Frenchman Bay in Maine, Michael Ruby begins with wisdom and ends with delight, reversing Robert Frost’s famous dictum about poetry. The Mouth of the Bay begins with the ancient wisdom of the Eleatic philosophers on the coast of southern Italy and Sicily—“There is no beginning and there is no end”—and their calls for personal purification.