The Ida Pingala by Debrah Morkun

Debrah Morkun’s words compose dynamic fields. Her efforts push poetry onto the page to energize language by reaching toward its limits. Between the “”janus-lipped morning”” and “”miserable neighborhoods”” a resistance forms according to what can be said and what actually gets said. Morkun confronts opposing forms and possibilities (like the ida and pingala of the title). Here poetry is electrified by the tensions of sound and meaning.

~ Hoa Nguyen

The Ida Pingala is a living installation: a pulsating repository of psychic energies that relate to the subtle body. This book is so incredibly brilliant in imagining how worlds operate and open up within worlds. The heroine is a vision champion; her fog body passes through appearance, etheric remainders and an historical abyss. As psychopomp she carefully mediates between the gross and ethereal, the living and the dead through a practice of intentional breathing which enables psychokinesis and telaportation. I think of this book as an incredible grimoire and book of hours that thrives on information gathered from studying complex transitional phenomena. The Ida Pingala is a book of great magnitude.

~ Brenda Iijima

Debrah Morkun’s newest work is a magickal document of time, memory and apparition. It builds upon the waste and war that we are told is in our nature to create a voice that resists that very notion. Morkun is a seer of mythos in the quotidian & a critic of crusade culture. Here is call to build shrines atop toilets and engage the laureled dead, revealing the symbols that rationalize their passing. Here is a tension rooted in the struggle to speak, a birthing pang that comes into the world as song. Up comes the breath to pronounce rough exhalations of ancestry, insisting on redemptive possibilities amidst the dread that precedes and surrounds us. The Ida Pingala insists that now is the time to sing.

~ Frank Sherlock

Emerging from the wreckage of neoliberal capitalism and its apparently endless cache of distractions, Morkun’s searing Ida Pingala gifts us breath and fire and song and a tangle of vessels that transport us beneath and across the skin of the page. Here we find ourselves in the past’s present, tensed and crawling in the dark, scraping at all this artifice for the underneath or the beyond or the other than this, scraping for “the last hopeful unreal.” The Ida Pingala never loses track of the body as a matrix of senses—the body as complicit flag-bearer and explicit question mark, an inscriber of trances, of alternative forms of social becoming, a skin that can itself be peeled away. “we are living in a dangerous time to be bucolic,” she warns. The Ida Pingala brings forth what Derrida calls the “monstrous arrivant,” that which has as of yet no category, no name, and that asks us if not to “close our jewel-covered books” then at least to stop what we are doing, breathe, and pay attention. This breviary, monstrous in form, perturbs the grid in small ways, pushing its way toward a poetics that will “marginally / affect natural rhythms / like weather, the need / for heavenly bodies/ to rotate, get out of orbit, / collide.” The heavenly here is also earthly, wherein language made strange asks of itself to consider how or if it can get us out of orbit, away from the “soldier cardboard cut out doll / better grown into the seldom-refrained cut out of America.” Morkun’s poetry uses multiple modes of performativity to write itself, the self/other, to breathe small flashes of the sacred into a world made more observant. The Ida Pingala is a work of extraordinary vulnerability, a counternarrative of extrasensory care. It is under my skin, caught in my mouth.

~ David Wolach

Debrah Morkun believes in near death experiences & prays to the old gods. She toys around with magic & the coin toss, attempting to synthesize the two into holy orders. She lives in the city of brotherly love, where she curates The Jubilant Thicket Literary Series. She practices the poetics of the possession dance, & regularly tours sites of abandonment. She is also the author of Projection Machine (BlazeVox, 2010). Visit Debrah at www.debrahmorkun.com.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 100 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-074-3

$16

The Ida Pingala by Debrah M… by BlazeVOX [books]