Poetry. Drama. Art. Music. "It has often been said that Marcel Duchamp gave up art for chess. Geoffrey Gatza has reversed the process, and produced a sumptuous 'souvenir program' of a performance of Stravinsky's ballet Apollo, framed by an elaborately-plotted chess game between Duchamp and his female alter-ego, Rose Selavy. The results are stunning."—John Ashbery "With APOLLO, Geoffrey Gatza has created a unique Surrealist romp with assemblages (both visual and myriad-genre) of various tropes and delights: mythology, ballet, chess, tableau, theatre, documentation, image, memoir, sound. Amazing! This is a tremendously ambitious weave, truly a meditation on various slices of belletristic-artistic power that have shaped his (and our) ethos and consciousness in ways that come alive here with determination and grace. 'The word smithereens does not exist in the singular.' He pulls the fragments together, as they perform and re- enfold with a deeply performative flare. Bravo."—Anne Waldman "I've played many games of chess but none like this. Modernist art plays its gambit. As we journey through the game the ways of seeing multiply. Win or lose, it's a wild ride. The fetish of board, pieces, hands... players. Listen and learn. Let Geoffrey Gatza's textuality lift you out of your 'addled tranquility.' Pas de deux with one of Duchamp's 'madmen of a certain quality', watch the choreography of the corps de ballet unfold. Pause for the deeply humane and human interstices in passages of real tenderness and poignancy. Herein is the new surrealism. Entrez!"—John Kinsella
It is the way things change that brings the myth to Kenmore, the poet's hometown. This collection of poems is one work, divided. Blending two stories, the story of Gwion And The Wisdom Potion and the apocryphal apocalyptic text, The Book of Enoch. Through Devils, Giants and Dream Visions; A Magic Silver Fish of Wisdom, a witch and maple keys the poet passes through life to a rebirth in the womb of a witch to a new life to a death that begins to look like life to come back to find providence is truly suburbia.
From Canto 70: ""As it opens, the cityscape turns black."" It: the poem itself; the American sky as varied lights of dawn encroach. Cityscape: the literal city of the poem; the ""city on a hill,"" as it were, our nation microcosmically seen as a series of highs and lows, peaks and valleys, spires and skyscrapers. Turns black: the buildings shadowed by cirrus and cumulus; the decay of this, our 21st American Century, already a failure thanks to the most venal presidency we will ever know. Geoffrey Gatza's got a solution: the re-birth of the greatest ""good guy"" to save us all. Gatza just so happens to birth a new kind of poetic narrative, while he's at it. Meet the challenge to dare, dream a functional American future rooted in past ideals seemingly long dead, and read Dreadful Quietude.[ Ethan Paquin ]Geoffrey Gatza's poem, set in 70 cantos, relating to the years of Superman's life and death in print, 1938 through 1993, details the 20th century American poetic style and motive. This is a post-9/11 reading of America and it's un-erring depiction of what is right and just. Pick up your copy today! What's the matter? Have you nothing to say about America? Do you not dare be grandiose? This work is grandiose if nothing else. Here, Gatza masterfully concocts an intelligent and lucid saturation job as his contribution to the American avant garde in a time when this tend to be pass. Dreadful Quietude marries the gusto of a comic book with a collection of fascinating esoterica culled from 100 years of western history. Gatza's poetry is unassuming and engaged, this work marks him out as a poet to keep an eye on.[Aloysius Werner; Contemporary Poetry]
Featuring poetry and recipes by 8 contemporary writers including book reviews, a short story by Kirk Curnutt, a new column by Kemel Zaldivar and introducing Jane Wong and Danny Jackson-Pierce.
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