I was supposed to write daily about poetry books. The soul is willing, but the flesh is lazy. I was swamped with dayjob things that I had allowed to accumulate due to procrastination. In this blog post for early April, I will do a pictorial representation of what I can manage to remember that’s relevant to the writing experience. My writing experience... I cringe as I type “writing experience” -- it sounds tacky, like the dreaded high school writing composition entitled “My Ideal Vacation.” Speaking of high school, I remembered earning money -- it was lot of money for me back then -- selling book reports to my classmates. I even dumbed down some of them depending on the customer. We are once again off track... This is our first picture for this itinerant blog post. Upper Rubber Boot Books Couplets: a multi-author poetry blog tour is still underway. I made a guest post on Peg Duthie's blog. There, I blabbed about an Arlene Ang poem that I loved, loved, loved. My stories and poems recently found home in these gorgeous publications. Dadaoism (An Anthology) edited by Justin Isis and Quentin S. Crisp Chômu Press, May 2012 order from Amazon story title: "Nowhere Room" "Nowhere Room" is a short tale about a kid who grows up while being perpetually wedged in the floor of his room. Yup, he can't get out because his mother wants to keep him safe. "Nowhere Room" appears in ta da! We Bury the Landscape.
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This is post #7. Every day for the entire duration of the National Poetry Month, I will try to post short write-ups about poetry books that I like. Pictured here are three of the early chapbooks by Bruce Boston. I have most of his books, but these three are my old favorites. Conditions of Sentient Life Publisher: Gothic Press ISBN-10: 0913045055 ISBN-13: 978-0913045053 To buy from Amazon Conditions of Sentient Life is a one-of-a-kind collection of 44 poems and flash fictions on dark red text against gorgeous cream-colored acid-free paper. The intricate illustrations are by Marge Simon. I only wished that the stunning illustration on page 35 was selected as the cover art. The first poem, “Stars May Rise to Hell and Back,” tells the reader again and again that: …hunger has no mouth to sing… The piece’s musicality is a paean to the apocalypse which comes in various forms in the ensuing pages of the book. From the hopelessness of “Future Past: An Exercise in Horror” which starts off with: Assume tomorrow has already come and gone and you now inhabit no more than a string of damaged yesterdays… to the emergence of technology in “Human/Technological Dimensions on the Eve of the Bimillennium,” which scars us to the point when we end up asking ourselves: When did we become so small we can no longer touch the moon? The flash fiction, “Dream of the Burmese Gardener,” is a surreal account of how galaxies are created. Mr. Saketa, one of the lascivious inhabitants of a certain manor house, carefully fashions “the first planet in the universe to be composed entirely of dead aphids.” “Refugee” is a tight, meditative piece about the subjectivity of reality. Oh, and it doesn’t fail to entertain with juxtapositions like: “the mayor’s beautiful daughter…or is it the chimp?” Conditions of Sentient Life is beautifully capped by “Gravity Drives the Blood and Bends the Light” which declares that …when we reach up it calls us down… These lines ring in the mind, and they ring hard. In the first issue of Kaleidotrope Magazine in a review of a bizzaro book, the critic Martin Earl offered what for me was the best take on surrealism in literature: “surrealism is confusing but ultimately understandable.” This is true for Bruce Boston’s Surrealities, a 64-page book of poems and illustrations (Boston’s rendition of Rorschach inkblots) lending stunning insight on the human condition: the violence (Two Nightstands Attacking a Cello), the humdrum (A Life in the Day Of), the obsessive-compulsiveness (Surreal Wish List), and the exquisite madness (Before the Vilification of Hypnagogic Birth). Surrealities is replete with ekphrastic references. In “Portrait of My Dead Brother with Burning Wing” An immature boy in a sailor suit refuses to leave the beaches of Port Ligat. The great masturbator considers the obscene history of the Third Reich. From “Revealing Their Eyes” reveal sunflower burning giraffe eyes. Music -- possibly because its form is amorphous, its influence is intuitive, and thus the most powerful representation of the surreal -- is a common element in this collection. This music comes in many forms: from static to the cacophony of fear and panic. The foreboding “Lizard and Wind,” the best piece in the book, tells of: The lizards were everywhere and so was the wind. There was no way you could keep either of them out that hard spring. All in all, Surrealities is a very important contribution to the literature of the surreal. The Lesions of Genetic Sin Publisher: Miniature Sun Press ISBN 0967666600 An evocative broadside-length piece about mutation. Mutations of men, the dead, and probably the ones in between. “The Lesions of Genetic Sin” is a breathtaking long poem that has all the makings of a snow globe: deceptively lightweight, and once shaken violently, it reveals its beauty. Not to mention that it includes the most original of wordplays: “bodysalt,” “vile-urchin-argot graffiti,” and the sensual “corolla’s velvet violet insistence…” |
My BooksThe Drone Outside
Black Arcadia Meditations of a Beast Butterfly Dream Age of Blight Lifeboat A Roomful of Machines Grim Series We Bury the Landscape InterviewsBellingham Review
SmokeLong Quarterly Weird Fiction Review The Collagist SmokeLong Quarterly Kitaab SF Signal The Mangozine Carpe Noctem Blog Friends of Chômu Press Her Kind One Writer's Journey Flash Fiction Chronicles JMWW One Buck Horror Every Day is an Adventure Five-Minute Fridays Lisa Haselton's Blog Prick of the Spindle Connotation Press Philistine Press |