"Linger to Look" reviewed on "Braver Self"

Roberta Shultz has reviewed "Linger To Look" on her blog "Braver Self... Tells from the Tall Side".

Among other things, she said: "The over-arching themes of Linger to Look seem to be desire, belonging, transformation, and loss. Many of the poems are spoken in the voice of a woman who longs to dance and break free from the bonds that tether her to dusty reality. Horse, bird, water, and stone images abound. Musical use of language led me to finally read many of the poems aloud to myself to further experience the poet’s skill with sound. ... Linger to Look is a dance of musical language and metaphysical imagery, swirling in experimentation and shimmering in the jingling of human heart."

Thank you, Roberta Shultz, for your kind words!

Introducing "Un Petit Salon"

Black/White. An Art Exhibition

AvantAppal(achia) (Issue) 2 Coming Soon!

Hey, Kinfolk! Thank you for being part of the family! It's nearly time for (Issue) 2's deadline. Please remember the deadline for (Issue) 2 is November 30, 2016.  We need your short stories, visual art, and poetry. See the Sub(missions) page at www.avantappalachia.com for details Video and audio also accepted under certain circumstances.Get those submissions in, y'all! You are what make our ezine revolutionary!

"Early Morning Sky" Wins Special Recognition Award

My digital painting, "Early Morning Sky", has won a Special Recognition Award in the Digital and Photography category of the 2016 "Nature" Competition and will be included in the 2016 "Nature" Exhibition on Light Space and Time Online Gallery throughout the month of August 2016. https://www.lightspacetime.com/nature-2016-art-exhibition-photography-digital-category/

The painting is available at http://fineartamerica.com/profiles/sabne-raznik.html?tab=artwork

Elkhorn City Night Market - Be There!

I'll be there as a vendor. Will you be there?

AvantAppal(achia) (Issue) 1 is Live!

We are an excited bunch here at AvantAppal(achia)! (Issue) 1 just went live! Thank you so much to everyone who submitted! Please submit again. Remember, while we do publish some Appal(Trad) - traditional Appalachian work - our focus is on the experimental, on stretching the boundaries of what can be done in art. I don't mean shocking, although that can be good sometimes, but definitely surprise us. Our motto: If it doesn't surprise us, it'll bore our readers. It's a chance to challenge yourselves as artists and writers and to expand the readers' horizons. The deadline for (Issue) 2 is November 30, 2016! We are overjoyed at the prospect of reading the next batch. Thank you for helping to bring our little dream to life! www.avantappalachia.com

Much love to all of you kin,

Sabne Raznik

Poetry and Art Ed(itor)

Submission Deadline Looms!

Submission deadline for first issue is coming up: May 31st! Get your poems, art, and short stories in our inbox! www.avantappalachia.com

National Poetry Month 2016 Challenge Facebook Group Workshop

National Poetry Month is upon us. This year, to mark it, I am hosting a workshop in the form of a closed Facebook Group.

 The workshop is centered around a writing challenge. The challenge is to write one poem a day throughout April, so that when the month wraps up each participant has 30 poems. If, for any reason, a participant misses a day, then it can simply be made up on another day, so long as the end total is 30. Collaborations are also welcome, if any wish to do so. Length, form, or genre don't matter. The only criteria is that each poem must be a "found" poem with a nonpoetic text as its source. Sharing results is optional.

Although the Group is closed, if any like to join they can message me as the administrator at my Facebook Page "Sabne Raznik".

Join the National Poetry Month 2016 Challenge Facebook Group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/1028734460530372/.

Happy National Poetry Month!

Review: "The Architecture of Chance" by Christodoulos Makris

Christodoulos Makris, The Architecture of Chance, (Wurm Press, 2015) 108 pages, poetry, $19.00 U.S.

Christodoulos Makris has established himself as one of the most important experimental poets working in Ireland today. The Architecture of Chance is his latest offering.

This is an exciting collection. Makris is fearless in his experimentation and is pushing poetry into whole new forms and realms of being. Most notable in this regard is "Chances Are", which he calls a mass collaboration poem. It appears in the collection as its HTML code. This poem can be found in application at 3am Magazine. It is a poem composed of every tweet that uses the word "chance" and updates in real time. Another boundary exploder is "From Something to Nothing" in which he took an informational text on the International Monetary Fund website and cycled it through several languages back and forth on Google Translate and turned the results into a poem that reveals much about the dynamics of language in the age of the internet. Given that Makris hails from Cyprus and has spent time in the United Kingdom while being based in Ireland, this experiment could be read as a commentary on the migrant experience.

Many of these poems are also political in nature. In "16 X 16" he writes: "I would have been a completely different person without the politics and a completely different writer." This is evident in poems like "Metro Herald's Advertorial Windbags Let Loose, 28-31 May & 4-7 June 2013"(which, as the title suggests, is a composition of adverts and editorials from Dublin's Metro Herald newspaper), "Civilisation's Golden Dawn: A Slideshow"(which contains pieces of speeches made by members of Greece's Golden Dawn party, whom Makris describes as neo-fascist), and "Public Announcement" (composed from the signs hanging in the Skerries public library on a certain day).

Others are slightly more domestic. Some are composed from emails or tweets sent back and forth in collaboration. One is composed from bits of conversations overheard around Dublin on a particular day. My personal favourite is "Heaney after Rauschenberg", which takes all the four letter words from Seamus Heaney's first collection Death of a Naturalist and places them in order of appearance. While soothingly familiar in vocabulary, it decenters Heaney's careful poetics almost completely, as if Heaney fell into a black hole when he died and this is all that is left of him in the universe. In that sense, it serves as an eerie, aching tribute of sorts - even as it seeks to shatter the comfortable traditionalism of  Heaney's legacy. Here is a brief excerpt:

"sick home hard blow baby pram when came hand tell they were away held hand hers with next went into room time left four foot four foot year

grey only from cows into like away iron gate into bank with from snug rise dead eyes used soon this they cock from left hand came came down this sake spat take your time more hole tree wild more said into mare hill back like that were that time ones that back when

dark fill dead cold like they line from some keep full tall soon back fish load from surf bend turf fear make they like clay seed shot seem they show good from bark feel roots pits live live wild land root died when lain days long clay with eyes died hard bird huts guts from like were with hope like land pits into sore stop they flop down take fill then cold

west mayo crew they from when with eyes like bone skin rose fell like they kept with beef men's then poor make food they like dogs that been hard when they with they were hope less next like dark once port ship free tart from good swim sink with zeal were

from that held arms came with have them word dead till"

This is definitely a book which requires the reader to "do the work" (Anna Strong), but the rewards are substantial. The break with Romanticism and traditional verse that began with the Modernist movement at the turn of the 20th century is spinning into free fall out of control as we become firmly entrenched in the 21st (much like society in general) and, like other experimental writers like him, Makris is making sure this is well represented in today's poetry. Only, he may be doing it better than most.

You can buy it at Amazon.