Apperceptions of Reinterpretations (Calliope Nerve Media), poetry by Felino Soriano, Reviewed by Lynn Alexander.
Felino Soriano has this amazing ability to weave a multi-dimensional scene replete with hidden histories and surmised contexts from works of art. I first became familiar with these poems from the work published in Full of Crow Poetry, then set out to find and read more of his work. I soon made my way to his website and then to this “e-chapbook” at Calliope Nerve. Continue reading
Connie Stadler (Calliope Nerve) reviews David Blaine’s new chapbook from Outsider Writers Collective: “Antisocial”.
David’s Blaine “Antisocial” is a hidden treasure. You expect poetic diatribes and rants, you get wonderful wit laden bites that must be read a second or third time or the rich profundity/in-your-face irony will surely be missed. Though seeming toss-offs ,these are multi-faceted, rich gems.
There are many targets here, but not specific “causes”, Blaine rather wishes to probe the fertile underbelly of the genesis of our sequential stupidities: Continue reading
Ceilings, by Jeffrey S. Callico. Poetry. Reviewed By Lynn Alexander.
Ceilings is not at all what I expected from Jeff Callico, but there it is: simple language, clear, cool, basic. They sit there, these short lines on these open white pages. You are alone with the poems.
I am familiar with a lot of Jeff Callico’s short fiction at this point, he has a certain way of presenting language, and he is not one to embellish. He has a style that is recognizable to me now, made up of linking certain lines, his repetition, this strange deconstruction of his observations of behaviors, reducing things down.To what? To their basic elements. Continue reading
A Brief Compilation, by polycarp kusch. Reviewed By Lynn Alexander. polycarp kusch has an ebook collection housed at The New Absurdist, featuring an assortment of writers, misanthropes, and malcontents.
A Brief Compilation is an ebook offering at The Absurdist Monthly Review, and features collected shorts by polycarp kusch, who claims to have invented the letter D and emancipated himself as a young child to live as a hobo in New Jersey. Only polycarp knows the extent to which the miseries that befell him in those formative years took their toll on his creative processes and subsequent rise to prominence. Only polycarp knows if that Stormtrooper he stuck in his pocket that day at Bobby’s did in fact turn out to be valuable despite having been removed from it’s original packaging.
What is apparent is that poor polycarp was permanently and irreparably demented socially, such that he remains incapable to this day of performing essential tasks in public such as grocery shopping, Chinese food ordering, parking spot selection, negotiating postage. Continue reading
The Giant’s Fence by Michael Jacobson. Reviewed by Lynn Alexander.
The Giant’s Fence is a visual novella by Michael Jacobson, eighty pages of something many people have not experienced before: asemic writing.
I’ll get back to what “asemic writing” is and what it isn’t to the extent I can, but The Giant’s Fence is an asemic work comprised of what Jacobson calls “trans-symbolic script”. The symbols are laid out in rows as many traditional texts might be, and eyes prone to English habits might indeed follow their paths in a linear way. They don’t have to, however, as there is no natural beginning or end outside of those habits or defined by the binding, the author has said that it is not intended to progress in a way that coincides with pages, to start at page one and proceed. You could start in the middle and come back around if you wanted to or experience the symbols in blocks, aggregate. The manner of “reading” and approaching the text is individual and the meaning is derived intuitively, the experience is subjective.
Discussing such work cannot be undertaken in the same way as we might start other reviews. It is necessary to explain some of the background of asemic writing right at the onset, in order to try to talk about what Jacobson is doing- as best we can. Continue reading
