Inside Narratives by Ethan Saul Bull

Inside Narratives is a drum kit more than a violin, and a morning book more than a plane-ride book. It’s a Romanticism that runs out into the yard with its eyes screwed in tight and finds nothing in the world not fundamentally valid. It’s I-and-I, I-and-I, and I feel this, the ceaseless recognition of myself and the poet simultaneous. Read it while by yourself or while holding somebody else’s hand. You may read it aloud, and you may read it aloud with a number of people at the same time. You will undoubtedly smile at each other a lot, and I’m pretty sure you’ll all feel very close together.

—Donald Dunbar

Where do we find ourselves? “where Buddha shakes hands I have been hunting the mail in the side streets and I have been the streets and the alleys numbered from six to ten in the dawn light and I have nearly fallen off the side of the earth where you push in a continent-sized bed, where Sitting Bull once stood . . . ”  Yes? No? Maybe? In Ethan Saul Bull’s poignant and brave Inside Narratives, Whitmanian naming and repetition clearly become what they already were: figures of desire sketching and erasing themselves in a single articulation, weaving and unweaving the beloved and the self in a looping, always unfinished tracing of desire.  Which thereby paradoxically catches up with its object: the figures and lives limned here, tangled by eros, were never any more finished, or “real,” or themselves than these anticipatory echoes.  So it’s a real world that rises up and shimmers here after all—at every moment conjectural and hopeful and haunted, and therefore free. Basho: “Even in Kyoto— / hearing the cuckoo’s cry— / I long for Kyoto.”

—Tenney Nathanson

There is a way of seeing expressed in Ethan Bull’s poems—complex mimetic waves drifting from modernity, rippling through memory as a person or a state or flora. Proper nouns exploded, rent and mended—sometimes on the very same page. These poems show that sometimes a little extra is just enough. Swells of life everywhere. This is the new romanticism of which we speak.

— Joseph Mains

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Ethan Saul Bull currently lives and works in Mexico City though he has lived in cities at various altitudes. He is a graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing at The University of Arizona in Tucson. His work has appeared elsewhere. He loves love.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 100 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 9781935402602

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