Sunday, April 30, 2017

(Issue) 3 of AvantAppal(achia) Coming Soon!


Please, remember: you only have one more month to submit to AvantAppal(achia). Deadline for (Issue) 3 is May 31, 2017. We need your avant garde/experimental poetry, short stories, and visual art. Time is almost up! (Issue) 3 will go live on June 15, 2017.

Saturday, April 1, 2017

Go Down the "Rabbit Hole"!


Introducing my third full-length poetry collection, "Rabbit Hole"!

It marries the found poem with Gertrude Stein and deconstructs existing language to riff on the concept of the deterioration of language as signifier. Just as at the beginning of the 20th century there was the development of a concept that was at the time called New Morality (sin is a fallacy; do whatever feels good to you), so here in the beginning of the 21st century there is developing a concept that language itself need have no concrete meaning. Facts are in the mind of the beholder. The very fabric of reality as it has been known is unraveling. How we as humans communicate with our world, with other humans, even ourselves is fundamentally shifting. The ability to think and reason is changing. And while all that is serious in nature with consequences that have yet to be determined, this collection approaches it in a fun, almost mocking manner. This is Alice in Wonderland with language itself - you are Alice. As the poet, I am the Chesire Cat, you could say.

In his introduction to the book, George Fillingham writes: ""I want the reader to imagine a dream, a dream of the sort that is not quite a nightmare where the dreamer wakes in terror but rather a dream where the dreamer is led on from curiosity to curiosity, image to image, and, confused perhaps but no less surprised by the images, wakes with a head scratch and begins the day, thinking about the world as a much stranger place than when the reader laid down to sleep ... [In the poems where the language is more] extreme . . . the deconstruction of language . . . [mirrors] the shattered state of language today and the impossibility to understand discourse of any kind anymore. It is as if language itself is designed to disguise meaning rather than convey it."

Are you brave enough to go down the "Rabbit Hole"?

Available today on Createspace; Amazon and other merchants and channels within the week.