Poetry Bundle 1

Three essential poetry collections with 20% discount and free shipping!
Includes: Matt Bialer’s Fantastic Voyage, Robert Gibbons’ Under the Great Divide with Ed Dorn, and Jennifer Maritza McCauley’s Scar On / Scar Off.

Matt Bialer’s latest poem cycle is an elliptical odyssey through capillaries and corpuscles, into the body of illness, navigating the corpus of grief, testing for hope, pulsing within and through the embodied dreams of cult science fiction. In Fantastic Voyage, life is explored in microcosm and macrocosm, in the time tunnels of memory and media, and in the medium from which love emerges. What are the nostalgic models that swim toward our future like miniature submarines in the bloodstream of the unconscious? Bialer explores the mysteries playing out beneath the skin. Fantastic Voyage is a profound and intimate poem.

Robert Gibbons’ poetic seam runs from Black Mountain and the Beats, touching plateaus of elegy and ecstasy, coal and black vinyl jazz, war and supermarkets, basements of psyche and ragged peaks. It’s as if this New Englander sees the territory of the West and its equally rugged inhabitants for the first time with fresh, astonished eyes. From Colfax Avenue in Denver to abandoned town site of Manhattan, Colorado to the Garden of the Gods, we witness the accompanying population of Little People, Irish miners going back over a century before, or Native American guide knowingly pointing the way. Gibbons is no tourist. Seems right at home here, despite his ten-month only stay. Admits he’s no tenderfoot reading the back window of a passing car warning it’s protected by a 45 caliber automatic Colt pistol. Ultimately, although no longer still there, the great poet of the West, Ed Dorn, becomes his mentor from the grave. Rounded out by an original personal essay on the power and importance of Ed Dorn for the present poet, Gibbons has produced a vital, eclectic, intimate, and radical collection.

Jennifer Maritza McCauley’s Scar On/Scar Off runs the borderlands of mestiza consciousness, by turns neon-lit and beating, defiant and clashing, searching and struggling, in fistfuls of recognition, in constant pursuit of intersections and dualities. Drawing on Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldua, Toni Morrison, Claudia Rankine, and the inspirations of her late friend Monica A. Hand, through polyglossia and hybrid text, McCauley evokes vividly the relationships between psyche and city, identity and language. In the rhythm and snap of these poems and fragmentary stories, we find echoes of Sarah Webster Fabio, Beyonce, flamenco, Nikki Giovanni, street slang, danger and hope. This is a profound collection, a rebel language.