BlazeVOX24 Spring 2024

IntroductionIntroduction

Hello and welcome to the Spring 2024 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

Western Gull — a joint poem
Doug Jones and Clive Gresswell

Quadernetto / Little Notebook
Dennis Formento

Thing Of A Face
Mark Goodwin

from 100 Titles From Tom Beckett collaboration
paintings by Thomas Fink, poems from Mark Young

It Depends On So Much (anachronistic fiction)
James Joaquin Brewer

Ten
Salvatore Difalco

Something Cool
Kevin Thurston

Text Art & Vispo

Four Visual Poems
Pamela Miller

The Subject is Apples
Geoffrey Gatza

Six Visual Poems
Mark Young

Eclipse in Poem and Picture
Mather Cargil

Fiction

Robert Wexelblatt
Petite Suite de Musées

Mehreen Ahmed
Collector’s Item

Claire Beeli
His Wife

Jared Leeds
The Wall

Ethan Goffman
The Game

E.W.H. Thornton
The Balcony Over The Sea

John Tavares
Magic Hour

Rory Hughes
The Grind

Brett Ann Stanciu
Excerpt from Call It Madness

Scout McComb
Homecoming King

Acta Biographia — Author Biographies

BlazeVOX24-Spring24 by BlazeVOX [books] on Scribd