No Farther Than the End of the Street neighborhood poems by Benjamin Niespodziany Okay Donkey Press, 2022 ~ How just recently undiscovered the poems feel in Benjamin Niespodziany's No Farther Than the End of the Street, and how secretly they demand distraction. I've been ill of late, and in this lateness have come to believe that revelation does not come, after all, to those who wait. So I waited, and held, then read, this inescapably freed book. I am weak and want to say things simply. I strain to recall whole silences. I write that love is made of two people telling each other that they have a room at the hotel when neither of them do. Niespodziany takes the nameless and the familiar at face value and lets one mask disguise another. I am weak, I strain, there is joy here. In this verse, a neighborly, twinning joy...and a sadness brought to earth both by the alien mediocrity of grief and by those few doubled things that go through absurd shortages to single out loneliness. ~ reflection by Barton Smock ~ book is HERE
Tag: reflection
Summer – Johannes Göransson
Summer Johannes Göransson Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2022 ~ I think it might be too early for me to be putting words toward Johannes Göransson's Summer as I've only just finished its fourth and final section called The World and the fire as a whole is still trying to figure out which parts it still needs to set. But, I also worry some season will end, and I'll be in it and have to lie about how I moved forward. Göransson writes the under out from under. Beauty, death, the after. The after-art of living as something uncreated. If a ceiling fan falls on a trapdoor...ah, I have no then. I paint my kidnapper to look like my kidnapper, lose blue like a hand, let children make me sad, think maybe invention has always known where it's imagined itself from, and am poor but less poor for work like Summer and the care it takes of the false elsewhere. ~ reflection by Barton Smock ~ book is HERE
soft-focus slaughterhouse – poems – Dylan Krieger
soft-focus slaughterhouse
poems, Dylan Krieger
11:11 Press, 2021
~
With a punk patience for the previously prophetic, poet Dylan Krieger, in soft-focus slaughterhouse, predicts with the grey comedy of deep presence what pain is losing to our collectively photographic memory of being invasively untouched. This is a verse the closes distance with the body actual, a verse that does not suffer suffering, a verse somewhat for the uncrucified astronaut indebted to imagery but really and wholly for those who can remain nostalgic for prognosis while knowing how sick it is to leave one’s affliction to another. This is a poetry of essential saying, of wordplay and wordwork, and language needs to catch up.
~
reflection by Barton Smock
~
book is here
ISACOUSTIC* 