Departed Quantities: (A) Quantum Epic by John Dolis

In Departed Quantities: (A) Quantum Epic, John Dolis leads us by candlelight down into the rough basement of language, where a “painter in the painting paints / a painting of a painting in the dark.” Dolis’s richly allusive, multivocal language for vision collapses the distance between self and other “such that human being might be more / than we deserve, though infinitely less / than we can dream.” The sly, formally taut verse of this quantum epic is driven by a “luminous appetite” that “courts nothingness,” inspired by both the wish for a transcendental language and the reality of endless linguistic deferral. “There ought to be / a way to mend this dark dichotomy,” Dolis writes, then later, with a playful wink, he observes: “It’s just enough / to make a butterfly / queasy.”

—Tony Trigilio

With wry honesty and impressive skill, John Dolis contemplates internality over externality that is both total in its opaque outcome and adaptable in its brilliant details. In these poems Dolis engages us with a scintillating exploration of poetic illumination. Employing restless metaphors, Departed Quantities: (A) Quantum Epic, is a dreamscape of remnants that mark moments described as a world of broken symmetry, as an abecedarian exhalation of intense writing, as an open human mirror of the attentive witness. “What you can’t see can’t hurt you.”

—Geoffrey Gatza

“Now mind and matter fabricate a tapestry” and with its abecedarian structure, John Dolis’s phenomenal Departed Quantities: (A) Quantum Epic strikes this reader as a modern-day speculum literature, a veritable history of ideas devoted to post-Renaissance science, philosophy and aesthetics, bringing encyclopedic knowledge to bear on a quest for beginnings in a hall of mirrors. Although such work “requires illumination from a constant / source of light,” I lose myself in the warp and weft of the language, an eminently quotable epistle to the mythical “you.” I find a curious flea squatting across the middle verses, and that an “object does object to objectivity,” and watch unfold how “difference takes time / historicizes one event / to three” and find a poetry of the moment, “images that shatter hence / what language can collect.” “Beneath these psychic burns that boil / within like skin about to burst,” I find the storied trace of the world that “lingers,” to use Dolis’s word for it. Buy this book for “the ant…i […] / where events take place” and let “the electric company, / which, like its product, we don’t get to see,” have its pennies.

—Jared Schickling

John Dolis is Professor Emeritus of English and American Studies, Penn State University, Scranton. His published poetry includes Picture Perfect (Feral Press), Enlightenment (Feral Press), Time Flies (Runaway Spoon Press), and Bl( )nk Space (Runaway Spoon Press), as well as pieces published in such magazines and anthologies as Antemnae, Best in Poetry, Cotyledon, Echoes of the Unlocked Odyssey, Journal of Contemporary Poets, Logodaedalus, Magazine.Art, Midwest Poetry Review, New Orleans Review, Notable American Poets, Overtures, Paramasitic Propastitute, Writer’s Bloc, and “The Poet’s Farthing Card” Series (Feral Press).

Book Information:

· Paperback: 80 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-363-8

$16

Departed Quantities- (a) Qu… by BlazeVOX [books]