Today's book of poetry: Whirr & Click. Micheline Maylor. Frontenac House Press. Calgary, Alberta. 2013.
Unfettered and alive. A phrase from a Joni Mitchell song. It comes to mind easily enough, Micheline Maylor's Whirr & Click almost pulsates in your hand. These vital poems spark, small blue flames appear between your fingers and the page. Maylor has mastered that most difficult of tasks, she has made very plain speaking narrative poetry both vibrant and lyrical.
Whirr
When I was a child, I ran into a wheat field. Golden straw framed
bright sky and our Irish setter snuffled her way to me while parents
called my name down the dirt road. I waited in relative silence for my
memory to fix itself to a point in the sky. Immaculately. Forty years
later, I can close my eyes and recall that shade of blue. But those voices
ran away and, even now, I cannot pull my often-heard name back out
of that time with the same concerned, loving tone. That moment is just
a dream except for this whirr called memory. This intangible cog turns
its wheel at the most unexpected moments. I drive past your house.
The windows are dark. I hear my own breathing. The world is still
much larger than I thought.
...
Patrick Lane says the following on the back cover of Maylor's Whirr & Click, as readers of this blog will know, when Patrick Lane speaks, I listen:
"We read the poems of Micheline Maylor and touch the urgency of a sharp and shifting
mind, sometimes playful, sometimes ineffably sad. She is a poet to read and wait for."
And of course he is right. Maylor's "sharp and shifting mind" is like mercury on a table, rolling with perfect gravity towards the truth of level.
Mercury
When Rob said, look at this,
he snapped a glass thermometer.
Mercury bled into his hand
while downstairs adults chattered.
He snapped a glass thermometer.
Ebb and flow in laughter
while downstairs adults chattered,
he whispered, quicksilver.
Ebb and flow in laughter,
down his heart-line, up his life-line,
he whispered, quicksilver
until his hot fingers tipped the ball
down his heart-line, up his life-line
into my palm and I felt it slide
until his hot fingers tipped the ball
down my life-line, up my heart-line
into my palm and I felt it slide.
It's poisonous, you know.
Down my life-line, up my heart-line.
Get it in your mouth and it can kill you
It's poisonous, you know.
Then he darted his tongue
Get it in your mouth and it can kill you.
He tasted his skin where the mercury had been,
then he darted his tongue
his eyes never moving from mine.
I tasted my skin where the mercury had been.
I let the ball roll into a pop-bottle cap
his eyes never moving from mine
did the same with my own tongue.
I let the ball roll into a pop-bottle cap
in my own hand.
I did the same with my own tongue.
Certain death never came
at my own hand.
He and I, eye to eye
certain death never came
in the bedroom.
He and I, eye to eye,
my first dangerous man.
...
I like how easily Micheline Maylor lets us into her movie, directs us, the readers, and our emotions like Duke Ellington effortlessly controlling tempo in a maelstrom of beauty.
On the 24th anniversary of losing my virginity
I remember the cold floor of your mother's basement
the itch of a wool couch, but only for a moment
before the present takes my hand, brings me back
to bills to be paid, the dog to be walked,
Valentines to be purchased for a daughter's grade four class,
with all its budding romance and sugar-coated
frissons stapled to foil hearts.
Would I know you now, were we to pull up
beside each other at a stop light?
The burning red, waiting for the green of go
while a glance of your dirty blonde hair shakes
its way out of moss-blue eyes
as we press towards a somewhere else.
There is none of that recognition anymore
none of that jump in the chest for one so far gone.
I remember the way your hands looked
by the light of the television,
the way your fingers might look today
resting on a wheel at the intersection of 5th and 33rd.
...
Reading Whirr & Click is a little bit like hearing a good eulogy. It is tender and loving with just the right amount of gravitas and humour, and it is so very human.
The Can
We go in packs.
In one of the stalls,
there is view into the boys.
Rachelle stuffs her finger in trying
to make the peep-hole wider.
I see James! He's got a wee one!
I gotta piss like a racehorse. You go, too.
I squat but nothing comes.
Andrea guards the door.
After lunch Kevin grabs me
round the middle
presses his hip into my back.
The heat from his fingers brands my ribs.
His breath unrolls, was
chased from a conflagrant wick
down my neck
down into my shirt
down.
I saw your pussy.
A flame in my ear.
...
A flame in our ear. Micheline Maylor's Whirr & Click is a flame thrower when it wants to be. I love the sudden and unexpected intensity Maylor bring to those everyday moments.
Whirr & Click ends with Maylor's long poem "Starfish", a taut and moving goodbye to a dear friend. Like the rest of this book, it reads like a familiar, a message from a voice you are already comforted by.
Some books feel like you've read them before, the wisdom is hard won but welcoming. Whirr & Click made me feel like I was sitting in the kitchen with an old friend, one full of humour and grace.
Maylor's previous publications include Full Depth: The Raymond Knister Poems and Starfish.
www.frontenachouse.com
Tuesday, December 3, 2013
Sunday, December 1, 2013
Thank You for the Window Office - Maged Zaher
Today's book of poetry: Thank You for the Window Office. Maged Zaher. Ugly Duckling Presse. Brooklyn, New York. 2012.
Leonard Swartz suggested that Maged Zaher might be an Arabic Coptic Christian Frank O'Hara living in modern Seattle. If I had to play that game, and it's one I enjoy, I'd say Zaher is like a much gentler and better educated Arabic Charles Bukowski with a tincture of Ron Koertge on the side. That's not to suggest any similarity in style or content between Bukowski and Zaher - it's more about character and tone, like Buk, Zaher is writing Outsider poetry.
I am hiding my vulnerability at the shawarma shop
Some people need to die for civilization's sake
Let me tell you about my exotic country then
Let me also tell you about the danger of not having a poetic project
Your dress invokes my longing for reality
I have a standard response for good looks
And the feeling that I will be punished for it
And that I will have to head back home to jerk off under pressure
The hit man is hungry
He needs encouraging text messages
Let us hear Hamlet moan because of his sore nipples
I have to stay here and ask for a better menu next war
There are people in the pub slowly eating their way into life
...
Thank You for the Window Office is a long poem, or a suite of connected and untitled poems, that explore the inside from the out, they are poems about navigating American popular culture, both believing in it and mocking it. As much as Maged Zaher is a participant he is always, even while participating in it, the outsider to the dominant culture.
Gravity arrived in a cab
Meanwhile three different treasure hunts were going on downtown
Please forgive our group their racial composition, Your Honor
The translator is thinking of the bodies of strangers
In my memory I located the texture of the theatre seat
You were sitting next to me
In my memory there is also a short order cook taking a nap,
A Marxist scholar studying utopia,
And a hostess who is tired
Outside of my memory there is a mortgage broker
And three environmental activists having breakfast
You look at your phone as if it matters
And scream three times before you inform them of your loneliness
You tell me: "Five more minutes to reach intimacy"
My mind is full of sexual images
Of many young academics arriving at the conference
With their hostile lovers
I ate my leftovers yesterday
Today I am planning
To start a new poem
...
And what a gaze. Although these short poems are not strict narratives they are compelling stories with dramatic insight and a hilariously hostile sense of humour. There are frequent moments of startling clarity where Zaher says that exact thing, that precise observation that reveals truth.
A comfortable chair for the poem
I am not worried—but then, I need more wisdom
Can you instead get me a heated croissant?
Revolutions need people with good hair
Lenin, Subcommandante Marcos, Chavez...
Ok—so reality is a little confusing
Justice will remain a simple data point
Language is always good to express the middle class
Money and roses for everyone else
...
These very spiffy poems articulately open a window onto a view of America that will be new for many, but Zaher is not only an Outsider — he is on the inside looking out at the same time. Thank You for the Window Office will open a few windows for readers who are new to the very talented Maged Zaher.
Maged Zaher's previously published books include Portrait of the Poet as an Engineer, and The Revolution Happened and You Didn't Call Me.
Maged Zaher reading poetry for the Subtext Annivery Reading 6.6.2007:
www.uglyducklingpresse.org
Friday, November 29, 2013
Light Light - Julie Joosten
Today's book of poetry: Light Light. Julie Joosten. Book Thug. Toronto, Ontario. 2013
Julie Joosten's first book Light Light floats in your hands when you open it. These poems are meditations of the highest order. When reading this book quiet descends around you, calm reigns. This is a pretty good trick to pull off with poetry. Julie Joosten debuts with a quietly contemplative book of little weight but hits like a brick and reads like an instruction manual to reason.
Wind
The wind is a tongue to watch or touch.
In it, a post with a hole bored by a beetle and three holes fissured by
drying. A violet trumpet vine extends a tendril, gentles into a hole,
withdraws.
Were the vine an animal, its motion would be instinct, the tendril's
spire turning through ellipses of thought.
Proof anticipates direction. It is noon repeatedly, sky repeatedly. It is
wind repeatedly, the moon rising or setting in declensions of light.
To infer an existence.
Thinking, by analogy, of fossilized plants, of how little of life is alive
in the world.
How in a little hole a tendril may keep its point for twenty hours
perhaps, or thirty-six, then withdraw.
We extend to accompany the plant.
-
We sway in the hatchery, learn synchrony from the silkworm.
Tenses forget to pass or pass imperceptibly: silk moth above a
mulberry tree, caterpillar on a leaf, white pupa bending moonlight.
How fruit drops in a concordance.
A wasp crawls from a caterpillar cocoon.
Your eyes bend the light in your hands.
A surface to trace with the eye, to trace the eye with.
-
To grow by looking. Little peering efforts unexpectedly given.
Shadow of a hovering kestrel. Purple-starred hepatica. A rough sea.
I lick fog, taste evening. Invite forgetfulness as a way to perceive you,
to let hepatica become a sensation without thought: a purple sea
spreading in sunlight.
Here I feel myself there - the other side of the sea.
A kestrel's shadow hovers on the sea's surface.
-
Quanta of light move in waves over the sea, move the sea to the
horizon.
Purple is a horizon extending the sky.
It seems not an earth-sky.
To think of attention as moving without trying to be moved to
shadow, hepatica, sea, to purple or sky.
Rain falls on the sea and forms a night field of circles glittering idly
in moonlight then dissolves into sea surface.
To give attention to what does not exist.
Here, there.
...
These poems read like very educated sermons from a service for a religion we have yet to discover. Joosten is all about enlightenment. These poems demand a certain pace from the reader, they slow you down until you become more patient, more considerate - but in an astonishingly clever move by Joosten, even as these poems require it of you they offer it to you, patience, consideration.
Wardian Case / Terrarium
As Thoreau was cataloguing flowers
a British ship came riding
from Shanghai, was a trough toward Calcutta (1851)
the ship's direction making crests from desire
carrying thousands of stolen seedlings.
An empire on the principle of the terrarium: in an enclosed
case, plants grow
fed only by light, watered only by
moisture condensed from the heat of the day and
returned to the soil at night
The tea seedlings were packed in sixteen Wardian cases,
boxes with glass sides and tops (later in the century
Darwin would write, "light [acts] on the tissue of plants almost
in the same manner as it does on the nervous system
of an animal").
It was an accident, Ward's discovery.
To watch the chrysalis of a sphinx moth metamorphose,
Ward covered it with a glass jar (the hills of Darjeeling
turned, too, turned green, then tended and pruned, turned empire)
and beneath the chrysalis, common grass and a rare fern sprouted.
...
Julie Joosten's long poem "If light stabilizing / if to receive a bee" concerns itself with Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717). Merian who had several plants, butterflies and beetles named after her, was a woman of considered thought. Joosten is clearly versed in biology, botany and all the other Bees but these poem has further reach and touches on sexism, ignorance, abortion, beauty, you get the idea. Joosten's poems do what the best poems do, they cast light or they cast questions. Joosten is not a boisterous voice, she is not screaming for attention but instead she is quietly and very articulately demanding it.
These subtle poems challenge the readers preconceptions again and again - consistently circumnavigating any bias the reader may bring to the work with arguments of reason, beauty and character. Joosten talks science with the big boys, Darwin is in here, Ward and his tea seedlings, but these are just details to a much wider focus - Joosten wants us to see the light, literally.
the light losing our words
Once in a field of abandoned hives.
Once with my eyes I, ghostly, felt a river dry to clay, lay quiet beneath
a blank sky.
Once there was a field, a river, there were mountains, I saw
reflections like phantoms, a surface of forgotten water, said take
the curve of a daffodil
bending toward snow, but leave the field.
They took nothing, left a memory of a river, wild raspberry, and honey.
...
To get to the heart of Light Light is to ask whether these poems work, do they entertain, do they excite, do they teach, do they illuminate? Yes, yes, yes and yes again. Julie Joosten's Light Light is heavy metal real, light light light as a thought.
Go to this link to see video of Julie Joosten reading her poetry:
http://www.bookthug.ca/proddetail.php?prod=201317
www.bookthug.ca
http://bookthug.ca/blog/from-julie-joosten-the-mind-as-a-mood-of-weathers/
Julie Joosten's first book Light Light floats in your hands when you open it. These poems are meditations of the highest order. When reading this book quiet descends around you, calm reigns. This is a pretty good trick to pull off with poetry. Julie Joosten debuts with a quietly contemplative book of little weight but hits like a brick and reads like an instruction manual to reason.
Wind
The wind is a tongue to watch or touch.
In it, a post with a hole bored by a beetle and three holes fissured by
drying. A violet trumpet vine extends a tendril, gentles into a hole,
withdraws.
Were the vine an animal, its motion would be instinct, the tendril's
spire turning through ellipses of thought.
Proof anticipates direction. It is noon repeatedly, sky repeatedly. It is
wind repeatedly, the moon rising or setting in declensions of light.
To infer an existence.
Thinking, by analogy, of fossilized plants, of how little of life is alive
in the world.
How in a little hole a tendril may keep its point for twenty hours
perhaps, or thirty-six, then withdraw.
We extend to accompany the plant.
-
We sway in the hatchery, learn synchrony from the silkworm.
Tenses forget to pass or pass imperceptibly: silk moth above a
mulberry tree, caterpillar on a leaf, white pupa bending moonlight.
How fruit drops in a concordance.
A wasp crawls from a caterpillar cocoon.
Your eyes bend the light in your hands.
A surface to trace with the eye, to trace the eye with.
-
To grow by looking. Little peering efforts unexpectedly given.
Shadow of a hovering kestrel. Purple-starred hepatica. A rough sea.
I lick fog, taste evening. Invite forgetfulness as a way to perceive you,
to let hepatica become a sensation without thought: a purple sea
spreading in sunlight.
Here I feel myself there - the other side of the sea.
A kestrel's shadow hovers on the sea's surface.
-
Quanta of light move in waves over the sea, move the sea to the
horizon.
Purple is a horizon extending the sky.
It seems not an earth-sky.
To think of attention as moving without trying to be moved to
shadow, hepatica, sea, to purple or sky.
Rain falls on the sea and forms a night field of circles glittering idly
in moonlight then dissolves into sea surface.
To give attention to what does not exist.
Here, there.
...
These poems read like very educated sermons from a service for a religion we have yet to discover. Joosten is all about enlightenment. These poems demand a certain pace from the reader, they slow you down until you become more patient, more considerate - but in an astonishingly clever move by Joosten, even as these poems require it of you they offer it to you, patience, consideration.
Wardian Case / Terrarium
As Thoreau was cataloguing flowers
a British ship came riding
from Shanghai, was a trough toward Calcutta (1851)
the ship's direction making crests from desire
carrying thousands of stolen seedlings.
An empire on the principle of the terrarium: in an enclosed
case, plants grow
fed only by light, watered only by
moisture condensed from the heat of the day and
returned to the soil at night
The tea seedlings were packed in sixteen Wardian cases,
boxes with glass sides and tops (later in the century
Darwin would write, "light [acts] on the tissue of plants almost
in the same manner as it does on the nervous system
of an animal").
It was an accident, Ward's discovery.
To watch the chrysalis of a sphinx moth metamorphose,
Ward covered it with a glass jar (the hills of Darjeeling
turned, too, turned green, then tended and pruned, turned empire)
and beneath the chrysalis, common grass and a rare fern sprouted.
...
Julie Joosten's long poem "If light stabilizing / if to receive a bee" concerns itself with Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717). Merian who had several plants, butterflies and beetles named after her, was a woman of considered thought. Joosten is clearly versed in biology, botany and all the other Bees but these poem has further reach and touches on sexism, ignorance, abortion, beauty, you get the idea. Joosten's poems do what the best poems do, they cast light or they cast questions. Joosten is not a boisterous voice, she is not screaming for attention but instead she is quietly and very articulately demanding it.
These subtle poems challenge the readers preconceptions again and again - consistently circumnavigating any bias the reader may bring to the work with arguments of reason, beauty and character. Joosten talks science with the big boys, Darwin is in here, Ward and his tea seedlings, but these are just details to a much wider focus - Joosten wants us to see the light, literally.
the light losing our words
Once in a field of abandoned hives.
Once with my eyes I, ghostly, felt a river dry to clay, lay quiet beneath
a blank sky.
Once there was a field, a river, there were mountains, I saw
reflections like phantoms, a surface of forgotten water, said take
the curve of a daffodil
bending toward snow, but leave the field.
They took nothing, left a memory of a river, wild raspberry, and honey.
...
To get to the heart of Light Light is to ask whether these poems work, do they entertain, do they excite, do they teach, do they illuminate? Yes, yes, yes and yes again. Julie Joosten's Light Light is heavy metal real, light light light as a thought.
Go to this link to see video of Julie Joosten reading her poetry:
http://www.bookthug.ca/proddetail.php?prod=201317
www.bookthug.ca
http://bookthug.ca/blog/from-julie-joosten-the-mind-as-a-mood-of-weathers/
Wednesday, November 27, 2013
The Sound The Sun Makes - Leanne McIntosh
Today's book of poetry: The Sound The Sun Makes. Leanne McIntosh. Oolichan Poetry. Lantzville, British Columbia. 2003.
There is an enchanting familiarity to The Sound The Sun Makes. These poems feel robust, strong and confident. That's no easy accomplishment with your first book.
The Bedroom
where I stepped into a world of chenille and chiffon,
a green canvas blind pulled down,
where a blue cotton nightgown
draped the back of a wooden chair;
tortoise shell combs, hairpins
cluttered the polished vanity and a photo
of my infant aunt in her coffin
hung on the wall at the end of the bed—
where I cautiously fingered satin panties and lacy slips,
where I hooked a black brassiere around my pinafore,
padded the cups with silk stockings,
felt the unsure curves. In this room
where my mother rouged her lips with her little finger
before a man, whose name I can't remember,
came to visit.
...
Previously in this blog I took a look at Leanne McIntosh's most recent book, Dark Matter, which was written with the help of Jack Sproule and published by Leaf Press in the spring of this year.
Both books mine the solid soil of narrative poetry and although The Sound The Sun Makes is a first book, McIntosh sets them up and knocks them down like they were ducks in a small pond.
1938
She rolls a circle of pastry.
He sits beside her peeling an apple in one
long curl as she taught him.
The room smells of cinnamon and sugar
the talc from her evening bath.
He slices the apple into a pan
she covers it with a thin floury skin
flutes the edges with thumb and forefinger.
He carves a line with the tip of his knife
and the soft crust splits. This is the way
they made me. Warm and scented
hands on his shoulders, she opens
her robe as far as he needs
until the planet tips and tumbles
from the bodice of the Milky Way.
...
Patrick Lane, High Priest of Canadian Letters had this to say about McIntosh's The Sound The Sun Makes:
"These poems reach out and find the deeper meanings we
always knew were there but needed her to remind us of.
I love her quiet eroticism, the understated lyrical lines, and
the delicate austerity of her poems. There is a full life
here, a kind of gift only the good poets can bless us with."
And of course, he is right. If I could write like Lane I'd have said the same thing.
Humanitarian War
A woman wraps her husband in a blanket—
the edge of the cloth stitched in gold
silk thread fine as hair.
Embroidered blue horses prance
unfenced across a carmine field.
Open mouthed blackbirds bleed into the sun.
After a night of bombing
a woman wraps her dead husband in the blanket
they shared on their wedding night—
she leaves him at the side of the road.
...
Leanne McIntosh examines death and sorrow, joy and light. It is all in here in these short sharp poems. Each of these poems is constructed like a heavyweight punch, while all the time McIntosh bops around, slips and moves like a fly-weight. Constant motion, no idea of where the next strike is coming from.
Although published a full ten years ago The Sound The Sun Makes was new to me and fresh as the day it was printed.
www.oolichanpress.ca
Note: As far as possible I attempt to write about books in the order they arrive from publishers. I have also tried to create a rotation so that every publisher who sends poetry receives the same courtesy. I will attempt to write about the most recent releases first, but am happy to read and write about books that come from back catalogues. If you have any questions or comments please forward them to: michael.dennis4@gmail.ca.
There is an enchanting familiarity to The Sound The Sun Makes. These poems feel robust, strong and confident. That's no easy accomplishment with your first book.
The Bedroom
where I stepped into a world of chenille and chiffon,
a green canvas blind pulled down,
where a blue cotton nightgown
draped the back of a wooden chair;
tortoise shell combs, hairpins
cluttered the polished vanity and a photo
of my infant aunt in her coffin
hung on the wall at the end of the bed—
where I cautiously fingered satin panties and lacy slips,
where I hooked a black brassiere around my pinafore,
padded the cups with silk stockings,
felt the unsure curves. In this room
where my mother rouged her lips with her little finger
before a man, whose name I can't remember,
came to visit.
...
Previously in this blog I took a look at Leanne McIntosh's most recent book, Dark Matter, which was written with the help of Jack Sproule and published by Leaf Press in the spring of this year.
Both books mine the solid soil of narrative poetry and although The Sound The Sun Makes is a first book, McIntosh sets them up and knocks them down like they were ducks in a small pond.
1938
She rolls a circle of pastry.
He sits beside her peeling an apple in one
long curl as she taught him.
The room smells of cinnamon and sugar
the talc from her evening bath.
He slices the apple into a pan
she covers it with a thin floury skin
flutes the edges with thumb and forefinger.
He carves a line with the tip of his knife
and the soft crust splits. This is the way
they made me. Warm and scented
hands on his shoulders, she opens
her robe as far as he needs
until the planet tips and tumbles
from the bodice of the Milky Way.
...
Patrick Lane, High Priest of Canadian Letters had this to say about McIntosh's The Sound The Sun Makes:
"These poems reach out and find the deeper meanings we
always knew were there but needed her to remind us of.
I love her quiet eroticism, the understated lyrical lines, and
the delicate austerity of her poems. There is a full life
here, a kind of gift only the good poets can bless us with."
And of course, he is right. If I could write like Lane I'd have said the same thing.
Humanitarian War
A woman wraps her husband in a blanket—
the edge of the cloth stitched in gold
silk thread fine as hair.
Embroidered blue horses prance
unfenced across a carmine field.
Open mouthed blackbirds bleed into the sun.
After a night of bombing
a woman wraps her dead husband in the blanket
they shared on their wedding night—
she leaves him at the side of the road.
...
Leanne McIntosh examines death and sorrow, joy and light. It is all in here in these short sharp poems. Each of these poems is constructed like a heavyweight punch, while all the time McIntosh bops around, slips and moves like a fly-weight. Constant motion, no idea of where the next strike is coming from.
Although published a full ten years ago The Sound The Sun Makes was new to me and fresh as the day it was printed.
www.oolichanpress.ca
Note: As far as possible I attempt to write about books in the order they arrive from publishers. I have also tried to create a rotation so that every publisher who sends poetry receives the same courtesy. I will attempt to write about the most recent releases first, but am happy to read and write about books that come from back catalogues. If you have any questions or comments please forward them to: michael.dennis4@gmail.ca.
Monday, November 25, 2013
Infiltration - Ben Groh
Today's book of poetry: Infiltration. Ben Groh. Grow & Grow. growandgrow@yahoo.ca. 2013.
Ben Groh's very handsome debut chapbook Infiltration is an entirely new kettle of fish for me. This dazzling little book is made up of small quotes and passages from a myriad of sources. Everyone from Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Langston Hughes, Thomas Pynchon to Walt Whitman. Add to the mix some bible passages and some quotes from science texts.
Groh has taken one word from each of these borrowed texts to amplify a brief quote from Franz Kafka that appears on the first page and acts as both an introduction and a Rosetta Stone.
If this sounds confusing it is because I lack the skills to properly illustrate what Groh has achieved. Reading his book is probably easier than reading this particular blog.
Without using a word of his own Ben Groh has created something truly new and original (at least to this reader). More importantly he has produced a chapbook that is wildly rich in language, ideas and style.
It is fascinating work, the finished product is really quite amazing. And fun.
www.growandgrow.com
Ben Groh's very handsome debut chapbook Infiltration is an entirely new kettle of fish for me. This dazzling little book is made up of small quotes and passages from a myriad of sources. Everyone from Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Langston Hughes, Thomas Pynchon to Walt Whitman. Add to the mix some bible passages and some quotes from science texts.
Groh has taken one word from each of these borrowed texts to amplify a brief quote from Franz Kafka that appears on the first page and acts as both an introduction and a Rosetta Stone.
If this sounds confusing it is because I lack the skills to properly illustrate what Groh has achieved. Reading his book is probably easier than reading this particular blog.
Without using a word of his own Ben Groh has created something truly new and original (at least to this reader). More importantly he has produced a chapbook that is wildly rich in language, ideas and style.
It is fascinating work, the finished product is really quite amazing. And fun.
www.growandgrow.com
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