<TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText>City Lights Spotlight</TitleText>

City Lights Books transfers@onixsuite.com 20130918 eng

COM.ONIXSUITE.9780872865419 03 01 City Lights Books 01 GCOI 87286100977770 02 9780872865419 03 9780872865419 15 9780872865419 BC <TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText>City Lights Spotlight</TitleText> <TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText>Compression & Purity</TitleText> <Subtitle>Spotlight Series Number 5</Subtitle> 1 A01 Alexander, Will Will Alexander Born in 1948, Will Alexander is a poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, visual artist and pianist. He was the recipient of a Whiting Fellowship for Poetry in 2001 and a California Arts Council Fellowship in 2002. He was also the subject of a colloquium published in the prestigious African American cultural journal, Callaloo in 1999. Author of nine previous books, Alexander has taught at various colleges including University of California, San Diego, New College (San Francisco, CA), Hofstra University, and Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, in addition to being associated with the nonprofit organization Theatre of Hearts/Youth First, serving at-risk youth. He is a lifelong resident of Los Angeles. 01 eng 100 00 100 03 20 poetry 24 Internet CL Hierarchy California Writers 24 Internet CL Hierarchy Poetry 01 Few poets writing today can compare with L.A.-based surrealist Will Alexander in terms of the intensity of his imagination or his radically experimental approach to language as material object. Through the use of automatic writing, Alexander practices a surrealism of the word, creating densely textured layers of signification from its sounded and written forms. Compression & Purity, volume five of our Spotlight poetry series, is Alexander's seventh full-length collection. Known for his visionary epics influenced by poets like Césaire, Artaud and Lamantia, Alexander here returns to shorter forms to address his ecological, cosmological and historical concerns. Highlights include monologues from the perspective of "The Blood Penguin" and "The Pope at Avignon," a song by the "Water on New Mars," and an homage to Cesar Vallejo, "Combustion & Leakage." In true surrealist fashion, the book also includes both an autobiographical lyric essay, "My Interior Vita," describing the evolution of Alexander's artistic consciousness through jazz and surrealism, and his disavowal of the autobiographical process, "On Anti-Biography." An imaginative tour de force, Compression & Purity confirms Alexander's reputation among surrealism's foremost contemporary practitioners. "This new & rich gathering of Will Alexander's works – always in progress – marks him again as the true successor among us to the likes of Surreal & deeply explorative figures like Breton & Césaire. No other poet writing in America today does it the way that Alexander does – a range of words & images that startle & create new pathways for language & the mind-in-freedom (“alchemical, mesmeric, totalic,” as he names them in these pages). Compression & Purity, so aptly titled, is the work of a true American & world master – & a joy to have & read." —Jerome Rothenberg “Even at its most confounding, most silent level, this work will unavoidably enter and leave you by a genetic thread of conscious mind woven beyond your 'domestic horizon,; your ‘provincial description' to a vibrating ‘celebration of un-brokeneness.’ This song, in the genealogical terms of cognitive evolution, sings us backwards ‘or forwards’ into a state where we are undifferentiated from the cosmos and can speak, as Will Alexander does, in the full range at once of carbon from dust to diamond.” —Ed Roberson 02 African American surrealism that extends from the ocean floor to the outer reaches of space. 08 "If there is a true surrealist poet in the US, it is Will Alexander. His intense imagination frames poems that seem to have no structure yet function beyond automatic writing in clear and powerful compositions that send paths toward realms few poets reach." Bloomsbury Review 08 "Alexander's comfort and willingness to discuss occasions beyond our normal daily experiences excites the imagination with the warmth of ecstatic re-envisioning. This is writing that opens up new worlds, crisp and direct in its offering of unique and valuable gifts." Rain Taxi 08 "Will Alexander is a poet and poetic-critical interpreter of the world with a uniquely compelling voice, which has finally gained him the kind of recognition he deserves. . . He is his own medium: complex, transparent, opaque, shifting, hermetic, poignant, subversive, demanding, intimate, distant and, more often than not, all at once." Leonardo Reviews 08 "Welcome to the hallucitorium run by Will Alexander. He's a unique wordsmith, kin to the Surrealists' Breton and Cesaire, and in America the San Franciscans’ Philip Lamantia, Bob Kaufman, and Ronnie Burke. Alexander is a Californian as well (though from South Central L.A.). Transmitting trance-matic blasts of auricular combustion, Alexander’s lexicon is a 'glossary of vertigo.' His seventh book of intense techno-lyricism is expressed in fissionary monologies teeming with "engrained astonishment." Brooklyn Rail 08 "Compression and Purity works well as an introduction to Alexander's black surrealist oeuvre while still engaging and challenging his longtime readers. Though emotionally cold and detached, the poems more than make up for it with a genuine love of language and its power to effect change." SF Bay Guardian 08 "Will Alexander is a poet and poetic-critical interpreter of the world with a uniquely compelling voice, which has finally gained him the kind of recognition he deserves. . . . For those who know his works and those who don't, his clarities and opacities, with their internal rhythmic charge, will invoke a dynamic that figures, as the constellations once did, the myriad connections that tie us to our human and natural universe; the one interpenetrating the other without cease." --Allan Graubard Leonardo 08 "This new volume from the L.A.-based African American poet includes an autobiographical, lyrical essay about how jazz and surrealism affected the evolution of his artistic sensibility." Los Angeles Magazine 08 "Born in South Central Los Angeles, and a lifelong resident of Los Angeles, Alexander, who got his start publishing in Clayton Eshleman's groundbreaking journal Sulfur in 1981, is vastly under-appreciated--an important avant-garde poet, who deserves a wider audience." 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