In this collection of poetry, Marsupial Mouth Movements, former Indiana Poet Laureate George Kalamaras continues his ongoing series of Bone Sutras, poems that explore the interface of the human and natural world. Following his Surrealist forebears, Kalamaras explores the complexity of language, with startling images and juxtapositions, as a vehicle for visionary poetics. These poems seek to connect biological impulses to the realms of the spiritual and the discursive. In the process, the poems honor the varieties of human and animal life-mammals, marsupials, and the insect world, even probing the intelligence and "vision" that lie at the heart of molecules.
Poetry. "WE SLEPT THE ANIMAL is one of the most intensely populated books since Whitman--and yet, 'We are made / in the image of loss,' Kalamaras reminds us in 'Letter to Eric from Cripple Creek.' Like the Richard Hugo book which is precursor, we find poems and letters here, but addressed to a wider range, a vaster group of Americans, living and dead and to come. I know of no other book with this generosity, with this ambition so divested of ego. 'I know what it's been to step west,' Kalamaras admits, as The Rocky Mountain West, indeed the country as a whole, become populations engaged with complexity and love. There is mourning here, but even more celebration."--Bin Ramke
The bric-a-brac of the world finds a strange, sudden beauty in George Kalamaras' THE HERMIT'S WAY OF BEING HUMAN: the human mind emerges from its self-enclosed exterior to embrace all the world's multitudes in these poems' stunning long lines.
Poetry. EVEN THE JAVA SPARROWS CALL YOUR HAIR is a bright book amidst dark times. Witness a young woman birthing a perfectly oval egg or learn the ropes of the Wang Wei Board Game, taking on the role of a lute or a panda chewing bamboo. Kalamaras's electric poems move delicately between Eastern mystic thought, surrealism, and meditations on the human body and soul. They suggest that the body's true spiritual worth can be discovered in its connectivity with the universe, alighting a pony on the tongue or an ascending angel out of the spine: His quieter musings work not so much as to question, but to point out a direction of understanding: "When you pull the earth apart to plant iris bulbs, what is that purple bending at the back of your throat? What bird sings in the Chinese elm with your vocal chords and the step of your weight that leaves traces of threatening sky on pointed leaves?
This book examines Eastern philosophies of meditative silence in the context of Western rhetoric and discourse theory, arguing that silence is an authentic mode of knowing. Rather than an emptiness that is nihilistic, the void of meditative silence is, according to the author, a fullness in which meaning occurs. Kalamaras calls for a rethinking of the implications of such a concept of silence on contemporary theories of composition and the teaching of writing.
George Kalamaras, a former Poet Laureate of Indiana (2014-2016), is the author of fifteen books of poetry, eight of which are full-length, including "Kingdom of Throat-Stuck Luck", winner of the Elixir Press Poetry Prize (2011), and "The Theory and Function of Mangoes" (2000), winner of the Four Way Books Intro Series. He is Professor of English at Purdue University Fort Wayne, where he has taught since 1990.
George Kalamaras' THE MINING CAMPS OF THE MOUTH is the winner of the DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press 2012 Chapbook Contest. In The Mining Camps of the Mouth, George Kalamaras's newest book, we encounter a poet "who dares to write location--and not just about location." Kalamaras tramps over the most tramped-over area as cultural ideal in American life--the West. With the aid of grave witchers who dowse up corpses, he untombs lives never mentioned in the history books, mining camp prostitutes for one. To these unheralded lives, he adds his memories of his dog Barney, the poet Gene Frumkin, and a "Dream in Which Frank Waters Is My Mother" where Waters tells him "it's easier to grieve than to mouth the sound of now." This book, which ends with an astute send-up of cultural criticism, continues and enriches this important poet's explorations of subjectivity and the discourses it drives, including history, as he "mouths the sound of now. --Roger Mitchell Kalamaras laurels that part of freedom which knows no bounds except the crime of love. Read him sideways, read him backwards. This is the mouth of a cannon that fires at all conventional assumptions. --Alvaro Cardona-Hine
This book examines Eastern philosophies of meditative silence in the context of Western rhetoric and discourse theory, arguing that silence is an authentic mode of knowing. Rather than an emptiness that is nihilistic, the void of meditative silence is, according to the author, a fullness in which meaning occurs. Kalamaras calls for a rethinking of the implications of such a concept of silence on contemporary theories of composition and the teaching of writing.
George Kalamaras, a former Poet Laureate of Indiana (2014-2016), is the author of fifteen books of poetry, eight of which are full-length, including "Kingdom of Throat-Stuck Luck", winner of the Elixir Press Poetry Prize (2011), and "The Theory and Function of Mangoes" (2000), winner of the Four Way Books Intro Series. He is Professor of English at Purdue University Fort Wayne, where he has taught since 1990.
Poetry. EVEN THE JAVA SPARROWS CALL YOUR HAIR is a bright book amidst dark times. Witness a young woman birthing a perfectly oval egg or learn the ropes of the Wang Wei Board Game, taking on the role of a lute or a panda chewing bamboo. Kalamaras's electric poems move delicately between Eastern mystic thought, surrealism, and meditations on the human body and soul. They suggest that the body's true spiritual worth can be discovered in its connectivity with the universe, alighting a pony on the tongue or an ascending angel out of the spine: His quieter musings work not so much as to question, but to point out a direction of understanding: "When you pull the earth apart to plant iris bulbs, what is that purple bending at the back of your throat? What bird sings in the Chinese elm with your vocal chords and the step of your weight that leaves traces of threatening sky on pointed leaves?
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