TYPESCENES by Rodney A. Brown, reviewed by Hex’m J’ai

• Publisher : Unlikely Books (September 11, 2020)
• Language : English
• Paperback : 70 pages
• ISBN-10 : 1733714359
• ISBN-13 : 978-17337143

Typescenes by Rodney A. Brown

 was a finalist for the Medal Provocateur, but did not win. It is still a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize, which will be announced around May 10.

 

Typescenes  is an Experiment:

Through

The

Poet’s

Wielding

Of

One

(1)

Word

“_________”.

Typescenes is an experience.  

The author has, through the medium or vehicle of prose poetry, invited us to participate in both….the Experiment and the Experience which are essentially one and the same, though not identical.  Are you intrigued yet?  Are you confused?  Have I lost you yet?

Excellent!

To clarify, once you crack open Typescenes you, the audience, have agreed to participate in the endeavor.  Whether you are an active or passive participant is irrelevant.  Whether you are aware of participating is also irrelevant.  This is an experiment in the application of language and its effect on the human psyche.  Particularly, the application of one word, “_______” to create solid connections or divisions in meaning through subtle and obvious direction.  It is the use or application of “_________” in a similar fashion to the “one thing” of the Thrice Great Hermes.  

The author’s execution of this endeavor is at once simple, precise and enveloping.  Through the author’s wordsmithing we are invited to enjoy a work of avant-pop sensibility that is smart, interactive and is still readily accessible to all.

To paraphrase the publisher of this work, the Forward, Preface, Acknowledgements and About the Author are not required to engage in this work.  You could just jump directly into the poetic density unassisted.  That said, by partaking in these peripheral items your experience is thoroughly enhanced as they are deftly crafted and execute the perfect preparation for the work itself.  This creates an experiment that is therefore collaborative.  

In conclusion, I implore you to “_________” Typescenes.  By “________”ing Typscenes you will not just add it to your physical or digital library, it will also be a volume for ever in your psychic library. 

Typescenes is available on Amazon.

(Excerpt From Author’s Bio: )

Since this Author grew up being held up and also having to hold themselves down while colliding with separate and unequal educational and social service systems_ waves of culturally ignorant national drug policies on crack and opioid epidemics_ United States Veterans lives_ Black bodies with AIDS_ Black bodies on Black bodies violence_ federal surveillance of poor and woke bodies_ especially legalized brutality including government legislation leading to the murder and forced migrations of peoples This author knows miracles_

WILDFLOWER HELL by Tanya Rakh, reviewed by Hex’m J’ai

Alright readers, I would like to take this opportunity to welcome you to…

“WILDFLOWER HELL”

Feel free to stroll the grounds.  Take in the lush botanicals and verdant greenery.  Breath in the exotic aromatics, feast your eyes upon the plumage of rare birds, behold golden boughs heavy with sensuous fruit, submerge the senses in the wonder……..Hey! Don’t touch……..oh, great….we lost another one.

(Remember, roses have thorns and smiles can kill.)  

“WILDFLOWER HELL: Amalgamated Poems” is Tanya Rakh’s most recent collection of poetry.  This collection is cleverly broken in four sections or chapters that correlate to the seasons and are assigned an appropriate flower.  An allusion to the Victorian language of flowers?  Perhaps.  Visual symbolism with an intended meaning?  Absolutely!

Regardless of the intriguing layout of the collection, the true magic(k) of this book lies within the individual pieces.  Each is a piece of imagery laden fruit reminiscent of the French Symbolists in aesthetic and an active experiment in form.  Yet, these are not simply aesthetically appealing filler or mere decorative language arranged in a pleasing fashion.  Oh, no.  There is a darker, dystopian, undercurrent pulsing through these petals (knowledge comes with the curse of being tainted so the myth implies).  Alluring, razor-sharp petals etched with Tanya’s surrealist filagree cutting doors to the unique dimensions of her mind’s eye.  Through these freshly carved doors we can partake of a sensory engaging buffet where some things are sweet, some succulent, some bitter and some bite back.  And that, my friends, is what makes these pieces truly poetry.  

So, with that, I encourage you explore Tanya’s garden of botanical oddities, I can assure that you will not regret it.

(from Wildflower Hell)

that summer

She grows much older that summer. All amber and chlorophyll, she peels from her roots, lets her branches furl across forest in veins and rivers. Finds tesseract and pearl tooth hiding among willows, amphibious stars crackle for the choke point. 

In summer she evaporates, multiplies in prism, a gallery of refractions. She gazes into train lights and refuses. I’m tired, she tells them, spills out a dusty road instead, swaps her feet for years of windstorms. They say she lives here still, always howling. Until the day no one remembers, she echoes nightingale beneath your trees.

Dim memory lights and fissures in our boneyards. All oceans filled with swollen death, the mermaids left for orchid water long ago. 

Before the sun there was a poem here, verses sunk in soapstone, etched in gold. Each syllable a cut in time. Now the timeworn lines have found a doorway, loosened their ankle ties, but incantations fade and calcify with parallels, an undead choral prophecy.  

It always ends this way—the heavy dragon eats its tail in mired calculations. Always the sun rolling down the same mountain, that same weightless mountain where time and love move together but refuse to make eye contact, sleep rigid on opposite sides of the bed, the sheets soaked in pleading. The same nightmare cycles again.

Each razor story, every gray, splintered home. Each tall rooftop bent by this deafening momentum, this entropy dance of meat clinging to skeleton, these endless days of wheat and water.

All of this, alive in tapestry. Hungry for bones and hearts and holes through inertia. She grows much older that summer. Eats from fruit trees and falls asleep a stream. An ocean someday, a sun cascading down mountains. The moon rises here in whispers still; bright stars spin awake behind the haze.

Order Wildflower Hell from Amazon.

Tanya Rakh was born on the outskirts of time and space in a cardboard box. After extensive planet-hopping, she currently lives near Houston, Texas where she writes poetry, surrealist prose, and cross-genre amalgamations. Her work has appeared in numerous journals including Redshift 4, Literary Orphans, Heroin Love Songs, Yes, Poetry, and The Rye Whiskey Review. Tanya is the author of two books: Hydrogen Sofi (Hammer & Anvil Books 2019) and Wildflower Hell (Rogue Wolf Press 2021).

ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA by Christopher Ethan Burton, reviewed by Hex'm J'ai

Mr. Burton has been writing and creating for years.  As well, Christopher has recently been honing his craft on the spoken word stage giving definitive life, flavor and vibrance to his poetic works.  In the last year, with public readings cancelled due to covid-19, Mr. Burton took the opportunity to continue his live spoken word performances via Face Book and You Tube.  That said, Christopher Ethan Burton has finally taken his spoken word darlings and crystalized them, fixed them in his first published collection.  Though his first publication, Mr. Burton has painstakingly edited and re-edited his original manuscript to render the finished product as professional as a larger press, though this text is self-published and available to readers for essentially cost.  

Watch a performance by Christopher on YouTube.

Telling.  Autobiographical.  Honest and unashamed.  Witty, observant and nostalgic.  

Buzz words.  Buzzwords.  I could fill this page with buzzwords to describe the first published work of Christopher Ethan Burton.  They would be accurate, but they would be pale in meaning and be lost in the ocean of milk-toast descriptions.  This slim, self-published work deserves, in my humble opinion, a much closer inspection.

Between the covers of this unassuming volume is a microcosm(s).   Pulsing through these pages are what I call an alchemical blend that is matter-of-fact punk-rock simplicity combined with rich imagery.  Through this medium Mr. Burton creates a vehicle that can transport us to NYC in the 80’s through a child’s eye, dusty Hudson Valley libraries where the literary ‘greats’ reside or to bleak upstate Penitentiaries.  Through this blend, Mr. Burton offers us the opportunity to experience a myriad of emotions.  Righteous indignation, ennui, longing for the bitter-sweet past, the ego debasing and ultimate freedom of the quest for redemption, love, both young and innocent, tainted or that wise perfect love seldom described with accuracy.  All of these are possible destinations within the pages of Once Upon a Time in America.

That said, I encourage anyone who wants to take the trip, to pay the fare and hop aboard.

Gold Rush

Searching for Chinese food 

   in these odd times, 

like panning for gold in California

     after the rush was over

       and so many natives dead.

San Francisco transformed by that fever 

   into a robust city of vice.

      America, today flooded

with toxic politicians, 

      polluting our air waves. 

  It is mind numbing to think

   the populous falls time 

and time again for the old ruse 

  of smoke and mirror tricknology. 

The river alive with speed boats

   and families fishing for catch

hazardous to eat.

    Everywhere we look 

  rubber gloves on the ground, 

   like empty heroin bags

            and used syringes. 

Face masks finding their way 

         out into the ocean. 

   The gold was never in the mountains 

 or streams. 

  It was never in the oceans or rivers. 

The gold is the mountains and streams. 

    The oceans and rivers. 

   The gold is everywhere but our wallets.

   The gold is that piece of ourselves, 

like “Blue Birds trying to get out,

      we fight to keep down.

“Pouring whiskey on

   while inhaling cigarette smoke,

    and the whores and bartenders 

   and grocery store clerks, 

     never know that it is in there.”

Order Once Upon A Time in America on Amazon.

 

C.E. B.

Christopher Ethan Burton is a forty-year-old poet from New York. He began writing at fourteen, shortly after his father was murdered.  Fifteen years of his life were spent incarcerated, over ten of those years in New York’s worst maximum security prisons.  Today he lives a simple life with his girlfriend and her two children in Germantown N.Y.  He is the author of two chap books, “Once Upon a Time in America” and “A Dog’s Life.”

Poet/Artist Hex’m J’ai Joins GAS as Poetry Book Reviewer

 

In his own words: 

 

Writing, poetics, photography, visual arts etc. are all mediums I can channel energy into and receive energy from by the creative act.  I know that sounds ambiguous or pretentious, but that is because it is.  I love to live “mythically”, and these are vehicles for me to do so and vehicles that allow me to share said “myths” and creative “creatures”.  

It’s this energy and the myriad perspectives of the universe I can glean that draws me to the work of others.  It is also why I have always enjoyed and been willing to collaborate with others in creative endeavors, whether they were musicians, visual artists, fellow writers, etc.  There is seldom described sweet tension in the collaborative process where the sum is greater than those who contribute, and it becomes more than symbiotic as everyone leaves the project with more than they arrived with.  And that to me is love with a capital “L”.

Hex’m J’ai:

Currently resides on Earth with his significant other, offspring, various extraplanar entities (it is crowded up in here), two cats and a crustacean.  Hex’m J’ai has been writing and creating since circa 1990 EV. though this date is speculative at best as there is earlier evidence.  That said Hex’m has frequented the spoken word stage of NYS capital region since the mid 1990’s and continues to do so. The experiments of Hex’m J’ai have been published by:  The Rye Whiskey Review, Under the Bleachers, Unlikely Stories, Mark V, Alien Buddha Press, Rogue Wolf Press and several others.  Hex’m J’ai is currently the co-editor of Dead Man’s Press Ink.

Catalogue of Hex’m J’ai’s most recently published work:

Arm Chair Icarus

Lacklustre: The Meanderings of Mole-Man Jack

Elemental

Widdershins

Negative. Space.

The Secret Utopia of Mole-Man Jack

Death and war had become
The not so secret whores of
Celebrity
Even love (though not LOVE),
When scandalous,
Hiked up her skirt and let
Her spaghetti straps fall
Just off the shoulder

She new when the camera was watching
And straddled the bar between
'Raunchy' and 'tasteful'

Click

Far below the sewer grates
That catch broken glass, roses and tabloids;
Below the white monoliths and modern art
Tree houses;
Below the liquor stores, malls and crack houses;
Below the fallout shelters and syringes;
Below the streets
Of this city
Below it's
Egg

Lives Jack

Considering himself
A sovereign cosmic entity,
Jack concluded to secede from
The cultural union
Originally he wanted to move
In the other direction
But he found that battling
Rooftop samurai
Would be strategically
Unsound
Besides "they have satellites"
And lovely Luna had been claimed
By astronauts, witches and poets
Drunk
On potential....

He wanted her to have a world
A world of sun and sky;
A world of chalk drawings
And fingerpaint visions
A world of river parks and
First kisses
One of fairies and robots and
Mythic bliss

He forgot to speak of injustice
He neglected to inform her
Of the evil of restriction
Or that nature is a mechanism
He never told her where hot dogs
Really came from
Or that the lovely shapes of clouds
We're composed of poisons and
Evaporated blood

When her ghost was given
He forgot to cry
No, he didn't forget
He just couldn't....

Jack was a well educated nothing
A psychic sponge that could never
Be wrung
Though he had interest in current
Events
He found parties distasteful as
The agents and politicos
Would overwhelm him
Their onslaught of well
Crystallized rhetoric
And citations
Rendering him mentally
Frozen
Their sleek logic and
Eloquent passion leaving him
Befuddled and repeating phrases:

"The Emperor has NO clothes!"

In the kingdom of the one sock
Jack was the gracious co-ruler,
Along with his friends Bert and Raul

Here, below the radar and nonsense
He was no longer subject
To pocket fascism
For Jack surmised, being well read,
That it is far better to rule in
The basement
Than to serve in
The kitchen

Lighting fires would alert
The others
So Jack had acquired a taste
For his rat to be raw
Raul has seemed to have
Forgiven him for this
Indiscretion
Yet a ruler of Jack's prowess
Cannot be sustained on rat
Alone
Fortunately, the kingdom of the
One sock
Is abundant
With what he refers to as
The fields of the found

When it rains
High Spring
The Egg
As if by osmosis
Trickles a steady
Parthenogenesis
Raul is thrilled
Wormy tail swishing
In the liquid life that has
Been purified by layers
Of concrete and offices
Bert clings to the driest
Of supports
Until the Egg has abated

Some afternoons
Herald the arrival of the sage
The only outlander
Who does not suffer the vengeance
Of Jack's divine staff of reckoning
The sage brings offerings
Exotic treats of
Cheese, cigarettes and cheap liquor

Click

The village crier
And the shaman
Have been banished
There is a well tanned vampire
Invited into every home
Summoned by mothers
By children
By brothers and buttons
Sensory drugs compliment
The virus of language
Honing new creatures
Refining new golems
From superior
Calcinations

Click

Decomposition is ripe with Chi
Amidst his mushroom hell
Jack has erected temples
Portals to the out land
Thrift store televisions
Create an arching wall
Around his thrown
And he watches
He summons
He laughs

He still can not cry.

Click

At the bus station
Amidst the free philosophy
Of the restroom wall
Is the shaky signature
A scrawl of ownership
A window to the kingdom

"Jack lives"

Click