BlazeVOX23 Fall 2023

IntroductionIntroduction

Hello and welcome to the Fall 2023 issue of BlazeVOX! 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 develop 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

Poetry

Poetry Extra Extra

Notes from a Virginia Wedding
Jake Sheff

1 — 10
Rob Burton

8 Poems
David Allen Sullivan

Penelope
Wife X

from POINT OF NO RETURN
Charles Borkhuis

Hybrid Prose

From THE VISIT
Ana T. Kralj

Five Little Monkeys Apology
Kevin Thurston

SANDRA BULLOCK DOESN’T GET HER TESLA
and BEAVERTON, OR
Davy Crockett Wiggins

Text Art & Vispo

3 visual poems
Angela Caporaso

3 collage poems
Geoffrey Gatza

Talking to dead poets in the street
Julie Friend

Fiction

THE HERMIT
Ronald Fink

That Time I was a Bear
Jennifer M. Watkins

No Reason to Stay
Victor Bondar

A Real Man
Ethan Goffman

Every Rose City Has Its Thorns
Nathan Cover

Horse
Michael Loyd Gray

Rae Loves Roni
J.P. Kelleher

And There I Sat With My Piccolo
Stephen Baily

The Three Gifts
FR Khumalo

Promenade
Erica Weems

Dot Mader
James J Antonio

The Sisterhood of the Provincial Park
John Tavares

Acta Biographia — Author Biographies

BlazeVOX23-Fall23 by BlazeVOX [books] on Scribd