face blindness by Megan A. Volpert

“When you’re ready to venture off the daily grid of life-as-planned, enter face blindness where “a fetish object is the thing/to which we want/to give and to witness” and become privy to and part of “moments your camera could never capture.” You’ll find no prescriptions of an average or calming sort here.

Megan A. Volpert’s full-length debut startles and spirits us through the invisible and daring detritus of dialogue and story, NYC and Normal, Illinois, “name pong poetry” and “copyright infringement,” letters laced with love for John Yau and Roland Barthes, phantasmagoria and prosopagnosia, fecund cullings from the minds of Jacques Derrida and Friedrich Nietzsche, ambling pathos and anxious heart, and everything in between.

I am envious of Volpert’s renderings for all the right reasons: face blindness does not merely go beyond the boundaries of poetry as many reviewers like to tout, but rather, this woman’s words illustrate the fantastic meandering streets, skyways, and mind jetties that poetry itself can build and carry us along, and even encourages us to get out of our chairs and walk with that contagious energy, impassioned scenery included. In fact, if one looks hard into the face of this book’s pluralities, you will eventually recognize it belongs onstage somewhere, behaving badly and willfully, for our own voyeuristic benefit.”

-Amy King

“Megan A. Volpert has in common with other high-rolling ornery genius pistols a lot of nerve, a lot of heart, and an inability to leave anything said alone. She’s an original imp of the perverse well tended and set loose. Nothing’s forbidden, nothing’s unquestioned, well, perhaps only just the divine poem to which she both aspires and will not but barely in the poems in face blindness touch. She’s off on a great adventure, her misbehavior flagrantly fuels her fine excesses. Stay out of her way if you can’t take a little mussing up.”

–Dara Wier

“Smart, new, odd. I have not seen so many minds this singular, this energetic and weird and inventive in some time. Which of these several authorities is a better writer is immaterial, as together all these Megan Volperts amount to an invincibly bright collaboration. This is a book that plays freeze tag with the possible.”

–Gabriel Gudding

Megan A. Volpert is a performance poet from Chicago who has settled in Atlanta with her partner, Mindy. Volpert holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Louisiana State University, and currently teaches High School English.

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