NeoPoiesis Press
Celebrating the independent, creative mind.
New Releases
Former kid, current codger, Stephen Roxborough has learned a few things and survived the plotline to come back with another collection of Beat-infused jazz-smoked-hymnblast-meditations, and rants on the lost arts of patience, with all the vacillations, and ambivalences of aging.
—Geoff Inverarity, author of All the Broken Things
In this volume, Constance Stadler and Rich Follett remind us that poetry is not some solitary, solipsistic pursuit. Rather, it is a dialogic and social activity, one that involves collaboration, and yes, competition, but most importantly a conversation among the living, and with those whose voices have long since been silenced, but still echo across the ages through words inscribed on pages. Here they demonstrate the literary power of language made visible, and memory made palpable, summoning the demons of trauma and the angels of delight. But most of all they show us the strength we can gain from communing with the muses that are available to all of humanity, if we would only open ourselves up to their inspiration, as Stadler and Follett have done.
—Lance Strate, author of Diatribal Writes of Passage in a World of Wintertextuality
This third collection of poetry by Lance Strate is his most spiritual, and his most intimate. First Letter of My Alphabet is a personal pentateuch, populated by a diverse cast of characters that include Adam and Eve, Moses, Saul, Qohelet, Joan of Arc, Marie Curie, Brigitte Bardot, Max Weinberg, an assortment of superheroes, the Tailors of Eternity, angels and avatars, and the Supreme Being in myriad manifestations. Flashes of humor mix with bittersweet memory, poignant longings for escape are juxtaposed with calls for resistance and transcendence, sound and vision, speech and inscription, language and symbol, history and memory, past and present, the particular and the universal, the intellectual and the ineffable, all come together in a volume that speaks to flesh and blood and mind and soul as one.
Lunch With The American People is a
satirical tour de force that is high in
irony and humor and low on platitudes
and boring observations. Reading it
will satisfy your hunger for smart,
information-packed commentary on
subjects ranging from politics and social
affairs to
self-improvement hucksterism.
Holding up vice and folly to ridicule and
scorn, Lunch With The American People
continues satire’s great tradition of
supplying constructive social criticism
wherever needed.
Recent Releases
Amid the tangle of growth that takes place in a semi-tropical parcel of land left to its own, a yellow butterfly could remind one of a yellow flower, each there with a similar purpose: to be.
Stumbling on the roots of a strangler fig that runs across the path you are walking; how can you not think of your own roots, born in a past prior to your b
irth and continuing into whatever impact you leave on the earth after your passing?
The strangler fig will eventually choke the tree around which it grows. The fig itself ultimately becomes a micro-ecological system, housing birds, reptiles, mosses—thus, the process we know so well: death to life and back again.
Through a poetical homage to Boyd Hill, one of Florida’s beautiful nature preserves, Vincent Spina explores the circle of life and death, the influence of our origins, and significance of what we leave behind.
Turning to Ariadne, the Mistress of the labyrinth, the author asks for advice about how to face the end of times: aging and death. Just as the Cretan story of the Minotaur describes a journey towards death, Matthews travels labyrinths with her husband and others while consulting with her imaginary guide about what lies ahead. Unlike a maze which can trick and deceive you, leading to blind alleys and dead ends, the labyrinth is a trustworthy route on which you cannot be lost. Matthews follows the winding path, reflecting on poetry, folklore and psychology while receiving wisdom from the mythical Ariadne.
Dale Winslow's poetic vision cuts to the core of human bodily experience: The struggle of psyche and spirit to escape the unremitting reality of the physical and material. The tension between fission and fusion that renders and heals and lends life its fugitive frisson. Uncertainty and entropy in a fateful dance with the organic and orgasmic. The mechanistic prism and prison walls that the conscious heart beats against again and again. The quisquous quiddity of mortal form and substance against the blinding clarity of the mind's eyes, and ears, and touch. And the dark wings of language that lift and soar while at the same time casting a deep, dense shadow on the surfaces of the earth below. Heed now my warning: This is poetry that transports and transforms. Read these poems and you will be different. Read these poems and you will be changed. Read these poems and you will never be the same.
—Lance Strate, author of Diatribal Writes of Passage in a World of Wintertextuality
Notable
The Charge in the Global Membrane
B.W. Powe
Street Art Photos by Marshall Soules
*Winner of the Marshall McLuhan MEA Book Award 2021*
What is the subject of this book?
We’re immersed in a radical transformation of consciousness and sensibility through the advent of digital communications’ technologies. Everything is in heightened conditions of emergent flux and speed, of spiritual emergency. Responding to the transformations, this word-image work seeks the heartbeat inside the Genesis overdrive of our present. It’s a book of pulses and intuitions expressed in prose and poetry, street art and images, all of which record and reflect our deepening engulfment in manifesting generations of electricity. This book is about the charging of our time, and our charge for perceiving.
The global membrane is an evolutionary jump from the global village and global theatre into sensory, psychic alteration in which communications bring us at once closer and into sharp, painful divisions. A time of openings—expressions of humane empathy: a time of terrified, terrorizing closings—reactions against uprooting of what we know. Ecology, the afflictions of the Trump phenomenon, the quick-time evolutions of the internet, the rush of data influx, the upsurges in Nationalism, Trolls and Hackers, spiritual distress, crises of identity and A-literacy, #MeToo, the NetGens, the search for silence and rest, the intimations of a worldwide linked consciousness, the transfiguration of digital experience into cellular intimacies and addictions, the crying out of souls longing to grasp and express this dislocating jump-drive and its illuminating hopes, the shape-shifting artistic expressions of the current: all are elements of what we experience.
Are you Human? An invitation says on the internet. If so then click here…
How do we penetrate the screens and perceive what’s churning out from us and into us?
How do we catch the streaming, the breakdowns breakthroughs, the yearnings, the fears of the present?
How to describe this unescapable process, the unfolding, our transformations, the devastations, our longing, the effects of hyperdrive?
It’s hard to understand radical change when change is erupting in front of you; and when that charge wholly absorbs your attention and sensibility.
What are the forms and styles of this book?
This book is written in the streams of the new, pulling in its vibrations and alarms, its wonders and dislocations, the crystalline phenomena of what blazes at us all-at-once. In its streaming and feeds you’ll find Donald Trump, the Gaia Principle, cellphones, social media and trolls existing side by side with street art, and with William Blake, Simone Weil, Marshall McLuhan, Teilhard de Chardin, Susan Howe, Arthur Rimbaud, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith, David Bowie, Joni Mitchell. It’s a collage-mosaic that absorbs speculations on force and energy, the poetry of spiritual concern, direct addresses to the reader (breaking the fourth wall), aphorisms, traces and fragments, observations on our sensational phase of communications and the identity crises we find in demagogic passions and the spewing hatreds of shock-jocks, and a letter of hope to Netgens. It engages the polarizing extremes of politics, presents reflections on refugees and ecology, what it means to be living in the air—in the clouds—through digital access, prose poems about solitude and transfiguring imaginative energies, about the moral and metaphysical rages we confront and make, and which confront and make us.
What genre is this book?
All of them.
~ B.W. Powe