September 10, 2014
I have a new essay called NONAGON just out on the iconic Golden Handcuffs Review in their forthcoming issue #19 – click here to explore! My essay is a meditation on (and creative response to) Craig Foltz’s truly delightful new book WE USED TO BE EVERYWHERE, out recently on Ugly Ducking Presse (psst…quick as you can, purchase the book here or, if you must, here!). I first encountered Craig’s work in San Francisco while I was editor at Fourteen Hills, and have avidly followed his writing ever since.
The magazine containing my piece is available at your bookstore (should you still have one), or purchase a copy (or subscribe!) through the Golden Handcuffs website.
Here’s an excerpt from NONAGON:
“In this midway, the masters of ceremony mark four corners of the tent: we have non-eidetic memory, the cognitive body of the beloved, linguistic erotics, and the poet’s pursuit of the sublime. And within that wrinkled timespace, the freaks are silhouetted – fragile, vulnerable, evanescent, and alluring: the love story as discursive analysis. The Pacific Ocean as rudiment. Loss as lexeme. Memory as zero dimension.”
and another:
“Satisfying brackets of text, often numbered, suggest a diviner’s compendium.
The soothsayer’s methodology of extracting meaning from the mystery is a rewarding strategy for encountering this seductive collection of occluded stories and half-narratives. The noose ends of memories. A wire tied around the paw of a dream. The cord is always umbilical.
Foltz reveals a poet’s command over the paragraph, attenuating, extending, truncating the prose lines until an eerily deliberate prosody mesmerizes the reader.
Creating art is less about dynamic exchange and more about recalibrating the algorithms of the body so that it becomes autonomous from itself.
Once lured into the labyrinth, the need to leave – or even determine the center – is extinguished by a different kind of pleasure.
Suffice it to say that the semicolon will remain both mysterious and transparent. If she agrees to these conditions, will abstraction become something more than a word she can’t explain?”
In addition to my work, Issue #19 also features Robert Aurellano, Pablo Baler, Colin Browne, Kristin Dykstra, Brian Evenson, Juan Carlos Flores, Bénédicte Chorier-Fryde, Whit Griffin, Fanny Howe, Burt Kimmelman, Richard Makin, Brian Marley, Marie-Caroline Moir, Rick Moody, Alice Notley, Paul Pines, Joyce Ravid, Marthe Reed, Lou Rowan, Alan Singer, Brian Smale, Trey Strecker, James Tierney, Stéphane Vanderhaege, Diane Wakoski, Carol Watts.
Craig Foltz is a writer and multi-media artist whose work has appeared in numerous journals, galleries, and performance spaces in both hemispheres. He is the author of THE STATES (2007) and WE USED TO BE EVERYWHERE (2013), both from Ugly Duckling Presse. He has published two chapbooks, The BBQ Killers and Coming Up For Air on the now famously hard-to-spot Loudmouth Collective. He lives on the slopes of a dormant volcano in New Zealand where the progeny from Kahikatea will always be king.