My Kinship With The Lotus Eaters by Lewis LaCook

My Kinship With The Lotus Eaters confirms Lewis LaCook’s status as an irresistible poet of sensuous, intelligent, surprising work. At the border of synesthesia (“Ellipses in a woodpecker’s throat”), ephemera take shape and miraculously last. Surreality shines with sotto voce insisting its inner power:
From this year’s harvest you fold an angel
Crazed with briar with thorn and vine
I pretend not to see spiders and snakes
I lay it down in the shadow you reel
Out into the cold flashing storm
Amid the Ballardian phenomenon LaCook admires, we discover the poet’s gift for dystopian revelation:
The terrorists and their organ-swollen gospel hour
Wrestle folding chair after folding chair
Dreaming of better accelerant
Misspelling coffe, lousy with notifications
The poem ends with the enviable line, “They solder their wires while their wives dream of sheep.” In the apocalyptic “Anthropocene Spring,” we are haunted by the concluding reference to “The last customers in a store/In the last minutes before it closes.”
In this important new book, Lewis LaCook integrates precision and momentum with a muscular, romantic poetry that reaches our senses, our minds, our hearts.

—Sheila E. Murphy

The Lotus Eaters in this book are spiky, war’s on the ordinary horizon. The book’s intense descriptions weave and waver among nature, language, implicit fragility and violence – it reads as an uncanny guide to our world’s horizon of demise, wars and loves and being/s are all present as usual, and unraveling. However it’s also a salvation among daily life under threat, calming life frayed at the edge. I love LaCook’s writing and his ability to simultaneously warn and heal, all in the guise of semi-formal stylistics. Such surfaces, such undercurrents, harrowing and magnificent.

—Alan Sondheim

As a child, on interstate trips, Lewis LaCook thought the moon was following his family’s Econoline van. Upon reaching adulthood, he couldn’t tell whether the truth disappointed or relieved him, so he started writing things down. Some of these things looked like poems, and they may have appeared in journals like Lost And Found Times, Whiskey Tit, Lotus-eater , and Slope, among others. In 2012 BlazeVOX published Beyond the Bother of Sunlight, a book-length collaboration with Sheila E. Murphy; previously, Anabasis published his book-length poem Cling. Lewis can often be found wandering the wilds of Western New York state with his wife Lindsay.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 52 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-402-4

$16

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