Devil-Fictions by Lance Phillips

Everything we experience is sensation. Lance Phillips renders sensations perceptible just at the rarefied moment where perceptions exist between body and desire and world. In this he writes as a god of a particular and careful microcosm, attuned to even its vastness. You might look for clues of how to read this work—don’t. Let the sensory constructions build their perceptions in you, with language reaching beyond the edge of words, building the wing-beat-quick bridges of attention that loop ourselves, as networks of nerves and glances and concerns and positions, again and again, into continuous relation with the world.

—Cody-Rose Clevidence

Devil-Fictions unfolds in a swarm of particulars. And elegant abstractions. Here Phillips both weaves and unravels a “spider’s grammar,” a staggeringly intricate, fragile-strong network of both substance and reflection, here opposed, there entwined. Granular structures of matter and feeling fork like strings of electricity, shivering across curved folds of conceptual connection, philosophical arching and tunneling. “Scatter, iridescent over the marsh, dragonflies or my eyes had a vision.” He shimmers and grounds crocuses, sparrows, blackberries. The creature is unstable yet fixed against surfaces, thought is staged as much as a finch against a window, these phenomena invisible but solid, clustering. In echoes and flickers one hears Dickinson, Spicer, Beckett. Catoptromancy, apophenia, a grimoire. And in registers more like speech, in strange language almost overheard, a syntactic linearity enters in and out, a vivid humanness where there is violence, the sexual, the embodied — amidst the briar patches and wren nests of the rest. Its clockgears are spreading out, and darknesses, “tomatoes frosted black.” The musics are both delicate and harsh, glistening through a careful, crystalline, precise lexicon, a sharp syntax of floating concepts, loose structures, and sparkling densities. “Nature” is particular and tautological. In strange symmetries of localized places, in contemplation and vegetation, curvatures of impulse and restraint bend like “caving sunflowers.” And a deepening question of relation: what are the orders of events: chronological or numerical, logical or causal, serial and circling and plucked. Gorgeously, he opens a zone of fast bees and slow bees, things that can’t be incorporated, a “raw fog one breathes ghosts in.” It is all stunningly mysterious and beautiful. There really is nothing like it.

—Kevin Holden

Lance Phillips is an exacting, brilliant, graceful poet. His Blakean vision of contraries (opening the self, seeing in an oppositional mode) and the sources of the human is nothing short of stunning (“What the sleep garners // Ghost in // Certain insignia:”). Phillips’ language asks and explores: what makes a person? How do we see? What makes us think we know how to live? What makes us think we can learn how to live? (“The first honest thing remains that so many people are the same. I believe writing is a notion of emptying one’s thoughts. I foreclose any narrative.”) This is a stunning, necessary book.

—Joseph Lease

Lance Phillips was born on an Army base in Stuttgart, Germany (West Germany at the time of his birth) in 1970. He grew up in many places, including: Las Vegas, NV, Del Rio, TX, New Castle, PA, and Charlotte, NC. He attended the University of North Carolina at Charlotte for his BA in English and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop for his MFA in poetry. He has published four books of poetry, Corpus Socius, Cur aliquid vidi, These Indicium Tales, and Mimer with Ahsahta Press. He lives in Huntersville, NC with his wife and has two grown children.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 94 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-431-4

$18

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