Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize Winner of the California Book Award in Poetry Three kinetically distilled long poems by the singular American poet who “transfigures ‘thought’ into a weave of lexical magic” (Philip Lamantia) “The poet is endemic with life itself,” Will Alexander once said, and in this searing pas de trois, Refractive Africa: Ballet of the Forgotten, he has exemplified this vital candescence with a transpersonal amplification worthy of the Cambrian explosion. “This being the ballet of the forgotten,” he writes as diasporic witness, “of refracted boundary points as venom.” The volume’s opening poem pays homage to the innovative Nigerian-Yoruban author Amos Tutuola; it ends with an encomium to the modernist Malagasy poet Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo—two writers whose luminous art suffered “colonial wrath through refraction.” A tribute to the Congo forms the bridge and brisé vole of the book: the Congo as “charged aural colony” and “primal interconnection,” a “subliminal psychic force” with a colonial and postcolonial history dominated by the Occident. Will Alexander’s improvisatory cosmicity pushes poetic language to the point of most resistance—incantatory and swirling with magical laterality and recovery.
Poetry. "The domain of poet Will Alexander's nervy curiosity ranges from the icy Himalayas, to African savannahs, from physics, astronomy, and music, to alchemy, philosophy, and painting. Orishas, angels and ghosts all sing to this poet, instructing him in their art of verbal flight. This is a poet whose lexicon, a "glossary of vertigo," might be culled from the complete holdings of a reconstituted Alexandrian library endowed for the next millenium." --Harryette Mullen
Literary Nonfiction. African American Studies. MIRACH SPEAKS TO HIS GRAMMATICAL TRANSPARENTS is a philosophical meditation vertically scripted. It is an extension of Alexander's first book in this mode, TOWARDS THE PRIMEVAL LIGHTNING FIELD. Both books, in concert, exist as a double exploration in what, for the author, is a nascent odyssey, concerning the mind at non-limit through cellular transmogrification.
Workers in Alexandria are excavating for a new building when they discover the ruins of an old tomb, and all work crashes to a halt. According to federal law in Egypt, all discoveries must be properly catalogued by archeologists and this tomb has unusual relics and representations, apparently contemporary with Alexander the Great. Daniel Knox's first love is history and archeology, specifically on Alexander the Great. When he pisses off a local mobster on the coast of Egypt, he heads to Alexandria to an archaeology colleague's apartment to hide out for a while. He learns his friend is getting to participate on the dig for this newly discovered tomb. Sneaking in with his friend, Daniel sees signs that the find is far bigger than anyone realizes and might hold clues to finally unravelling one of the world's greatest mysteries: Where is Alexander the Great buried? In his lifetime, Alexander was beloved as a god, and across the Mediterranean, everyone wanted to be close to him. Upon his death, there was a mad scrabbling among his former allies to secure his empire for themselves. Even now, nearly 2500 years later, Alexander is still being fought over. With the discovery of this tomb and the revelation of its relics, the race is on to find Alexander. Rival archeologists, Egyptian officials, and Macedonian nationalists all scurry and scramble, attacking each other along the way as they hunt for a glorious prize--the body of Alexander the Great.
Kaleidoscopic Omniscience is a new collection from lingual contortionist and poetic sage Will Alexander, featuring his early works - Asia & Haiti, The Stratospheric Canticles, and Impulse & Nothingness. Alexander's prismatic and oracular voice cascades around bi-geographic confrontations, painterly morphologies, and the cosmology of the void. " Alexander is] acutely conscious of the issue of poetic voice, and is unwilling to let poetry's potential for ventriloquizing or exploring the voices of others be subsumed in an impersonal criture or ultimately homogenous montage. He seems as well interested in the spiritual dimension of poetry, especially in the degrees to which poetry can give us access to spiritual or emotional states beyond those we normally experience." - Mark Scroggins, American Book Review
Yet the voice of Will Alexander, who here commemorates Lamantia in his pluperfect poem The Brimstone Boat, rose hardly more than a quarter century later... In this automatistically extended poem, we are witness to the passage of energies from the older to the younger poet, as Alexander charts Lamantia's life and writings across a Renaissance globe... It is here as well that Alexander succeeds Lamantia, who died in 2005, as America's greatest living surrealist poet--as the new poet at the helm on the brimstone boat, on a voyage of 'perpetual exploration.'""--ANDREW JORON The volume starts off with the 81 pages of the title poem, then 14 pages for three shorter poems, followed by 19 pages devoted to a glossary, then 50 pages for the content of four essays, and finally 3 pages of post-notes. On the cover, the frontispiece, and the end page, are three works by the American surrealist Marie Wilson; also included are eight pencil drawings by Will Alexander and two large photographs of Lamantia and Alexander.
Diary as Sin is the powerful and evocative story of a blind girl, Rosanna Galvez. Confined to a private Catholic home in New Mexico, she unveils her beginnings as an incest baby - and moves through the odyssey beyond - with powerful incantatory language. Through poetic and often painful recall, Rosanna weaves a diary that will spellbind the reader with its imagistic and visionary prowess. Alexander cites Beckett, Bernhard and Goytisolo as an "ancestral trilology" for the work, living up to his forebears with some aplomb.
Black & White Paperback Edition.""'Spectral Hieroglyphics' is a timeless 'organic constellation' of poems on the unstoppable power of radical poetic vision...In this extraordinary troika of poems, Will Alexander not only shows the strong determination of three free minds to achieve a fully poetic way of life, he also demonstrates the actuality of their revolutionary visions...Alexander portrays these poets in the grandeur of their passionate ideas...Will Alexander revives these visions in a new myth for the future."" -Laurens Vancrevel, Foreword. Profusely illustrated by Rik Lina.
From Will Alexander, finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, a new collection of poems from the intersection between surrealism and afro-futurism, where Césaire meets Sun Ra. Divine Blue Light further affirms Alexander’s status as one of the most unique and innovative voices in contemporary poetry. “Since the 1980s, the Los Angeles-based Alexander has mixed politics with mesmeric, oracular lines.”—The New York Times Against the ruins of a contemporary globalist discourse, which he denounces as a “lingual theocracy of super-imposed rationality,” Will Alexander’s poems constitute an alternative cartography that draws upon omnivorous reading—in subjects from biology to astronomy to history to philosophy—amalgamating their diverse vocabularies into an impossible instrument only he can play. Divine Blue Light is anchored by three major works: the opening “Condoned to Disappearance,” a meditation on the heteronymic exploits of Portuguese modernist Fernando Pessoa; the closing “Imprecation as Mirage,” a poem channeling an Indonesian man; and the title poem, an anthemic ode to the jazz saxophonist John Coltrane. Other key pieces include “Accessing Gertrude Bell,” a critique of one of the designers of the modern state of Iraq; “Deficits: Chaïm Soutine & Joan Miró,” in homage to two Jewish artists forced to flee the Nazi invasion of France; and “According to Stellar Scale,” a compact lyric that traveled to space with astronaut Sian Proctor. The newest installment in our Pocket Poets Series, Divine Blue Light confirms Alexander’s status among the foremost surrealists writing in English today. Praise for Divine Blue Light: "Adopting a surrealist approach to making sense of the universe, Alexander plumbs language for its limits, often with dazzling results....Pondering the mysteries of existence and artistic influence, this engrossing work turns the quest for self-knowledge into a choral act."—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review "Alexander’s range—which moves past the propriety of each subject to the expansiveness of every—can be approximated as Aimé Césaire’s totality of the lion, or form and emptiness, or appositional, apparitional Black being. And this being is most real and realized through the collection’s quantum mechanics and dynamics, which Alexander invokes astrophysically, evokes metaphysically."—Jenna Peng, The Poetry Foundation "These surrealist and Afrofuturist poems examine politics, globalism, and the powers and limitations of language, while paying tribute to artists forced to flee the Nazi invasion of France.”—Maya Popa, Publishers Weekly "The 'invisible current' Will Alexander channels in the meteoric poems of Divine Blue Light is not surreal escape but vibrational engagement—an engagement with the infinite streams of the heart of being."—Jeffrey Yang, author of Line and Light "Like agua tilting itself into a god, Will’s texts suffuse the horizon of Poetry with the abstract purity of their oceanic movements, sun-condensing, dissolving seemingly endless sight into a disappearing instant of the Miraculous. Divine Blue Light exists by what it exudes."—Carlos Lara, author of Like Bismuth When I Enter
Poetry. THE AUDIOGRAPHIC AS DATA is none other than telepathic conundrum. It is language that renders the visible as invisible and the invisible as visible thus, transmuting both states into incalculable presence.
What you now hold was once a conversation between Harold Abramowitz and Will Alexander, recorded at a coffee shop somewhere in Los Angeles, and then transcribed by several listeners at various locations across the country. This book is not a book but a mediation of those sense experiences-as sound was separated from bodies and then concretized into text." "Some have described translation as an act of necessary betrayal (traduttore, traditore) in which the translator must deviate from literal translation to convey the poetic moments embodied in the original tongue. For transcription, the language stays the same, but its medium changes; the shift from audio to writing affects an aesthetic re-rendering of the sense experience associated with Will and Harold's project, and changes its audience from listeners into readers. Transcription betrays the original in yet another aspect, it marks an objectification of the material substance of the project, now a book. As an object, sound becomes palpable-property not of the ears, but of the hands and the eyes. Colloquy at The Abyss seeks to defamiliarize sense experience in order to question the way we listen and the way public life and personal experience continuously intermingle." -Ryan Ikeda
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