The Blooming Void by Peter C. Fernbach

Peter’s inimitable voice emanates from within a place of acumen, and intelligent wisdom. His masterful pieces move from resonant, to pensive and address everything from hegemony, to a dying fish. One must not put himself halfway into this author’s work, but rather immerse himself as his words demand an astute audience. I will leave you in the hands of the author: “May all/ That we think well today/ Not deceive us and turn/ Malignant tomorrow/ May all morphology be, in the end, benevolent” (My Hands).

—Aaron Thomas, Professor of English, Erie Community College

From the title poem, a paean to Joyce’s Ulysses, to “Mean,” a discourse on deconstruction, to the moving, understated, “I Woke with a Start,” to “Trying”: “our overfed cyborg children/ Who don’t know the difference between/ A noun and a reason for being,” the poems in Peter’s collection bubble with energy and wisdom, a rare combination anywhere. There is an interesting fusion in these poems of human warmth, cool reason, and a disdain for the fear and shallowness that births oppression, and the wondrous within the quotidian. Metaphysical yet playful, Fernbach’s collection percolates with a love for the strange beauty of language, and therefore, life. What more can we ask of a poet?

—Dr. Stuart Bartow, Professor of English, Adirondack Community College

To a class in Postmodern Poetry, Peter Fernbach wrote, “I like … poking into the dark corners of the mind and thought in general.” In The Blooming Void he enacts this. From a “sea of maroon”; from the “sludge” of a polluted world; from the genesis of a “Fruit Fly in Pile of Dirty Laundry”: from these and more emerges “a contrivance of mind” that may result in “A[n] [imperfect] human attempt/At control and understanding,” but, [imperfect] or not, what else have we? “These words allow me/To step outside/The interminable flux of time” so that we may eventually “find release from the tyranny of [‘things’].” So his Void shoots forth the blossom of love, and he offers us the bouquet: “A better world:/Peace, love./Can you/Believe it?”

—Dr. David Landrey, Professor of English, Buffalo State College

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Peter Fernbach, Assistant Professor of English at Adirondack Community College, is concerned, lately, with the transformative and liberating effects of poetry on the unconscious mind, especially of those who are still impressionable and exploding with exuberance and possibility. He thinks that poetry, as an art, and also as an epistemological approach, is undervalued in our increasingly semiotic culture; the ways of knowing that are provided by and through poesis are progressively being choked out in favor of a simplistic empiricism that allows for none of the nuance of the mystifying reality of which we are all a part. Therefore, most of all, he invites you to read.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 62 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 9781935402916

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