"These gorgeous poems emerge like songs from the flicker between slides..." — Jacqueline Waters
Excerpt ˇ
Excerpt
TRANSIENCENegotiations with grace, or
syllables each to next placed
in retort, or a caress
susceptive to complex
denials, or endless
efforts to put a stop
to time that yet end
Close ˆ
About the Author
G. L. Ford was a founding member of the Ugly Duckling Presse collective and a founding editor of 6x6. His poems have appeared in The Brooklyn Review and LVNG, among others. Chapbooks of his work have been published by UDP and Cy Gist Press. He resides in Harlem.
Links
Landscape of Fire and Music ReviewLandscape of Fire and Music Review on LitNav
Book Details
Trade PaperbackPerfect-bound. 64 pp, 4.25 x 7.5 in.
ISBN 978-1-937027-93-3
Publication Date: May 1, 2017
Distribution: SPD
Funding: the NEA and NYSCA
Advance Praise
Can you be patient with your memories? I mean, is there time enough? You can push one away for years, only to find, when you’re ready for it, that it’s lost its presence, fading into a denatured place “in which world and flesh / pull taut against each other / enough to allow / erosion.” In this sharp, haunting sequence of poems I feel like G. L. Ford is charting memory’s insistent dwindling, “like an alphabet / shedding letters,” marked throughout by dispatches from Gilgamesh’s half-beast best friend, who might find our present world “itself a judgment / on our faltering and / bestial sympathies, or not / bestial enough.” Ford’s got a wonderful, decisive ear and a deft touch. These gorgeous poems emerge like songs from the flicker between slides in the old slideshow.—Jacqueline Waters