26 Tears by George Tysh / Chris Tysh

What an abracadabra of abecedarian magic is 26 Tears! Evoking the Aramaic avra kehdabra, “I will create as I speak,” this collaborative incantation weaves a magical spell of language. Two poets riff in alphabetical measure with illuminating literary texts, an epidemic, and a quotidian of political angst. Here a double abecedary comes full circle as the responding poet counters the initial’s opening of “A to Z” with a “Z to A” turnabout. Powerfully ouroboric as alphabet’s tail joins origin with snippets from each corresponding letter!

— Maureen Owen

The shocks of the last half decade have left us breathless, with poetry gasping to catch up. Language itself registers the feints and shifts in unexplainable ways. In 26 Tears we have a quiet poetic conversation between two poets — who happen to be married to one another as they are to the art — in slant-stanzaed, short-lined poems that touch mind and heart in all registers. Nothing solved, described, or theorized, just the ever-shifting colors of words twisting back and forth on themselves in a world in pain.

— Norman Fischer

Chris Tysh is a poet and playwright whose latest publications are Hotel des Archives: A Trilogy (Station Hill Press, 2018) and Derrida’s In/Voice (BlazeVOX, 2020). She holds fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and The Kresge Foundation, as well as a Murray Jackson Creative Scholar in the Arts Award from Wayne State University where she teaches writing. She is the poetry editor of Three Fold, an independent arts quarterly, https://threefoldpress.org/current

George Tysh, in 1964, was a founding member of the Detroit Artists Workshop, and from 1980 to 1991 he coordinated LINES: New Writing at The Detroit Institute of Arts. He has received fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and The Kresge Foundation, and an Arts Achievement Award from Wayne State University. His most recent books include The Slip (2015) and A Thousand Words and Others (2020), both from BlazeVOX.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 122 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-426-0

$18

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