THE HAG, THE CUTTHROAT, THE AMPUTEE by Adam S. Cantwell
RAVINE by Douglas Thompson
A SONG TO OUR BLESSED MOTHER EARTH by Jonathan Wood
VALENA THE ORACLE by Nicole Vasari
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My previous reviews of this publisher: HERE
When I read these strikingly luxurious and decorated booklets in 2021, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
RAVINE by Douglas Thompson
“That death is growth once we reverse the film’s direction.”
A journey in 12 narrative prose poems from death to reincarnation as a raven to some hybrid of these states where a man returns to his own son and … well, I will not spoil this tour de force, and that is what it is. Douglas Thompson style now in an unimaginable topmost gear of wordplay, and cosmic, if sometimes only too ironically human, imaginative visions, where our whole state of being is covered. A raven as now a ravine, and bicycles are skelicles leading the ineluctable engorgement of all machines we travel in throughout some transubstantiating Plague, “making new unholy concoctions, impossible connections…” as I now see myself doing interminably. Feathers and Fathers. A sneeze and a paradoxical paroxysm. Both Forevermore and Nevermore. Tip-tap, tip-tap. The Null Immortalis as the grimace of a skull. “…gestalt to a fault, cream of the crop.”
“…coder corroder of colour and dreams.”
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/douglas-thompson/
Riven by reading…
VALENA THE ORACLE by Nicole Vasari
“And tumbling on the crests of those waves were carried the great deus sanguis moths, the size of birds, their heavy gem-encrusted wings shedding diamond dust as they, already tipsy from nectar, grew drunk sipping at the bowls of wine.”
From sanguis to anguish… toward that “hazy green country” of Anosia plexippus.
Meanwhile, I felt ashamed to relish such hedonist words that burgeon throughout this prose and its very clever and original plot, reeking, too, with concupiscence and hovering disease. As if the writing blood of Lord Dunsany, Clark Ashton Smith, Livia Llewellyn, Tanith Lee, M.P. Shiel and John Gale has commingled and entered our own blood and become a unique blood as gestalt. The tale of an Oracle woman whose character and looks stun us and the tale of her prophecies for others that turn back upon herself. Surely, never has lust by one woman for another woman because of the man in one of their bloodstreams been so powerfully issued and then drunk. Ashamed and guilty, yes, to relish it so. Even, ironically, stirring my own old blood that has otherwise been deliberating drained of desire to disable some disease within.
My previous review of this author: HERE
THE HAG, THE CUTTHROAT, THE AMPUTEE by Adam S. Cantwell
“To die in war, repeatedly…”
If words can become intractably readable, treadable earth, or land grab, or a defended nation’s GRUND, then we have them here, their al dente ignition of meaning teeth in a short stuff resistant but irresistible as one clings to one’s brain for meaning’s life. Through such semantic stuffing, I discern a story of a boatman for the dead, knowing of what these war dead did to suffer death and what crimes or sins of noble, ignoble aims, comparing such stuffing “idiot stone” ground to the bilge grit of a ship’s tangibility, till reaching where, never where, that Zeno’s paradox of half within half forever, an “endless cataract” “never to be completed.” That gluey Zenoism I have found suddenly always permeating unbeknownst to me the literature I have always loved, assuming you have been following my most recent reviews instead of spending interminable time with your “spunk rags” of the “standable sod.”
“…can both reach its destination and stretch on unfinished forever.”
My previous reviews of this author HERE
My previous reviews of the next author below: here & here
A SONG TO OUR BLESSED MOTHER EARTH by Jonathan Wood
“…letting the drift of Time exist for its own sake.” (my bold)
There is no way I can do justice to the sanctity and transcendence of this o so long song of passionate wordish, woodish texture upon several unbending pages, its resistless hallucinatalities, by one man of Nature and Craft and Folk Memory and much more, carver and moulder of masks, his own mask the Owl, his inner battles, then with his wife and two children as eventual participants in ineffability, and, with me, a would-be Brother Serendipity, and his more than just a dry hump of an embrace of a tree in the forest and its bark of ragged tears upon his flesh. That ‘standable sod’ and ‘can both reach its destination and stretch on unfinished forever’ from the previous stuffbred page construction above and these very hard core bound sharp cards with hidden niches under covers and above and within designs, whereby you can also see my fingers touching one of them in the images at the top of this page — all in tune, it seems, with this ineluctable song’s journey that outdoes any religion so-called with a new brand of fearless faith in fiction as truth, a faith that still needs a name beyond passion of the moment. Joys and fears incarnate and triangulated. Temptations to go back to the old pavement life finally resisted. I call thee Full Immortalis, no longer Null.
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