January Found by Michael Sikkema

January Found is a hallucinary of the contemporary, its poems contemporous wonder rooms filled with the outside noise of our culture. I didn’t even know that January was lost until Michael Sikkema found it for me here, leading the way for the other months looking to speak the future as these poems do: with incision, wit, and an oblique and energetic intelligence.

—Gary Barwin

The power of wandering is not a searching, but—in its anti-quest—the unpredictable magic of what is found. January Found reads like an uncanny artifact, a parapocalyptic field report from a betwixtuation. Situated only by always moving between “Wander Rooms and Outside Noise,” between the State and “the eros of thanatos,” Michael Sikkema’s soundings glimmer with contingency and think “like a kite on fire.” These are the voices in the wall with no one on the other side, owl songs as deciphered by a complicated keeper, the lust fumes that billow out of penned in perennials and exceed their containment. January Found is a dreamtime of perimeters, where poles collapse and break into countless tiny bones that make new instruments and new dancers. There is steamblue music here and whiskey. You will want to stay a while.

—Elisabeth Workman

Michael Sikkema’s poems are both carefully honed and fun to read. Each word seems to be happy where it is, and this can be funny, too.

—Aram Saroyan

What if animals have become bourgeois subjects? What if bourgeois subjects have always been animals? Are cash cows historical actors? What if you are a penned in perennial questioning “nature”? These and so many pivotal queries line the brain-body of this feisty book. Recipes for disaster necessitate much animal bi-product. Apologists calm the herd. Nature is a bastion for total recognition. Please help usher in the “newest animals”.

—Brenda Iijima

Michael Sikkema is the author of several chapbooks, collaborative chapbooks, and the full length collection Futuring from BlazeVOX Books. He lives in West Michigan, often facing north.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 102 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-170-2

$16