birthplace 1 This handheld pastless giant. Afternot of our unshaped animal. Patience, says the world. Knowledge can’t exist.
The New Quarantine Johannes Göransson / Sara Tuss Efrik Inside The Castle, 2023 ~ So I'm just going to start in the middle, or the end. I have kids who can't laugh. They press button after button. I draw a smiley face on one of the buttons. I'm an uneducated vandal, you should know that. I don't know what happened. I got drunk before I got drunk. A week ago I started The New Quarantine by Johannes Göransson and Sara Tuss Efrik. It is an overwhelm. For some reason, the first thing I wrote in response to it was "A movie about three paper cuts." The thing is, I didn't follow that up, so I don't know what I meant by it, or what it was supposed to trigger in me. Anyway, THE BOOK, it seemed all heart and guts and inside joke and even more inside absolute immaculate un-fingerprinted leapfrogged footfalled sorrow. And I thought I was okay. But then, I got to the end of it tonight and all of those things are true, but also, everything is vividly falsified and now I am grieving a beginning. Look, explanation is a nostalgia. I try to make myself pristine. I was sick for six months this year and am better now but it fucked up my teeth. And people still want to read what I write. Hell is wrong with them. I am so not pretty but kind of able to film stuff in fake poems in between capitalisms. My youngest son doesn't make me think of death, but he should. He is not well and his not wellness isn't appropriate. I am all over the place and I am nowhere. I did not expect a week ago that The New Quarantine would childhood me back to now. I am a very basic lover of obsessions such as orphan and widow and mirror. Well, fuck. I am just going to say right now that I know for a fact that you're not going to stay with me this whole time because I am about to go so much more south SO RIGHT NOW if you love me or believe me or think my brain is worth the salt I turn it to, go buy The New Quarantine and while you're there or away, check out Haute Surveillance by Johannes Göransson and Toxicon and Arachne by Joyelle McSweeney and basically anything else written by them as one or all, etc. I am a prophet with zero thoughts. This book was written before my memory kicked in. It builds collapse. All my words toward it will move away. I think it's right that things disappear. Right as rain that falls on one whose language lets me have mine. I don't believe I can scratch this off, even if I do. It's a lottery ticket that hell gave to apocalypse. It's a trap. Thirst escapes me. I cut up magazines about self-harm. I am trying to respond to these rejected sober closures of dead attractions. Arrogant, but belonging is an exile I abandon forward. In the reading, it is strange that I heard things advertised that no buying would solve. What dares violate the secret americana. Who. There is so much blood in the work that I can't tell whose blood is the silent alarm. I might have died for the laughing of the resurrected. Caught sex from a diseased script description of the exterior. In the reading also I felt like I was impressing god more with each spider I removed from my picturing of spiders. I unpeople. My suicide has no entry point, only penetration. Don't die, omg. This work is a love story, and I am glad I waited. It made me read it too quickly. I don't feel like I reached the end. ~ reflection by Barton Smock ~ book is HERE
OVERLAND
Natalie Eilbert
Copper Canyon Press, 2023
~
The wrongdoing, the math of it, so often abstract. Or hermetic. I sleep in a dark room where I pretend to sleep and my only light is my seasick joy. It is not right for me to misunderstand. Don’t worry, I only know this now in this undated now that comes before and after reading Natalie Eilbert’s considerate, final, and genetic Overland. If I fail, here, to say what comes during any writing of and, please keep at the very least that I almost didn’t make it through the book as I was taken into a particular sadness in thinking on those who will never read it. I guess it is no small thing to feel as a reader that one is in a good soft eye coming upon an egg that will hatch on sight. Overland is a decentering work, a work of shortlisted patience that checks our fictions and does not fake its wrongdoings to relieve relief. Soaked in the desolate allowances of solace that isolate permission, its verse is blessedly always a vowel away from reliving rescue, and it keeps the skull beneath the light bulb long enough to interrogate every ask. It hurts. Its devastating callbacks pinpoint flaw and fail. Earthly boredom, bodily boredom, the boredom of long beings who belong. Eilbert is serious about play and also about play. As in, we can’t use a name that has a name. As in, invention has no mother. I hope you will see these poems, and in the seeing I hope something is placed in the immediately created left hand of a hallucinating birdlike bird. As in, be carried. Its vision is a song to, and to, the loss of our dual invisibility.
~
reflection by Barton Smock
~
book is HERE
xviii. My sleep crawls into hers She hovers then holds an aerosol mask over the nose and mouth of our smallest The machine isn't trying to tell us something But cries anyway To its missing stomach If you google Vici Syndrome If you google Bird's beak Most of you have been Already To your last place To me the loudest noise has always been geography Death tells god it wants to die Not knowing where one is Was Heaven and the end of heaven
Birthmark and bitemark go as footprints into the dream of an Ohio bullet-hole. I want sisters but none of them remember being born. Sometimes when I turn off the oven tooth and pill have the same ghost. I can't say who death thinks it is. A swimmer distracted by water.
Dyscalculia Camonghne Felix One World, 2023 A blunt delicacy of slow care and tender economy, Dyscalculia, as doubly imagined by author and deeply reliable narrator Camonghne Felix, tells its story with its story. With break-up broken like the last romantic bone left as a soundbite trailing the howl that echo takes for snapping, it ensouls diagnosis with prognosis and makes of availability a border where on any given side a fringe context awards vision to those whose sight is an inheritance. Which is to say: It does the work. Felix uses verse as a suddenness with which to yield conversion from reversion while swearing on exhumations in a language that is both jarring and meditative. The performance itself designs a changeable, and elsewhere, audience that allows the reader to breathe above brackets and parentheticals as the marginalia of void and abyss. A warning, a trespass, a field, a comet- this is outside stuff that attends the inner. There is no reclaiming, here, of an old self, but rather a reclaiming of how one understands reinvention. To speak at its speaker, may we all ‘start to love what we know’, perhaps in stories such as this where the reading leaves those looking in the before-glow of its aftermath. ~ reflection by Barton Smock ~ Dyscalculia is HERE reflections by Barton Smock on the previous work of Camonghne Felix are here and here
xvii. We didn't think god would make a single thing. And now we're alone.
xvi. Gods take time. Photos named Sight’s late ghost… And all the babies. So far they seem one-sided
xv. You're the saint of how much we miss animals. There are two cruelties left. Not in the world.
xiii. and xiv. An ambulance carries itself as the dog of god. Nothing here is to scale. In prison, Ohioans hide bread in the bread. I out-hunger an abducted ghost. I set a bowl of soup in a shadow and wait for a rabbit to turn to stone. We call this road theft that it can’t be taken. I don’t know place. A tooth in my mouth that wasn’t there.
kingsoftrain 