A 5 star review of j/j hastain and Juliet Cook's collaborative poetry book, "A Red Witch, Every Which Way" which appeared via Amazon earlier this month!
Thank you Wayne F. Burke!
"A macabre work full of gory details and with a kind of surrealism that makes the reading of it a delightful adventure. "Pond scum will burst/out the eyes/once the eyes have been/revised into a film" (New Superhero), "...Box/elder stability/yearns for torn pages/in a series of open books" (Clawing At the Confessional), "Meniscus pirouettes/into maximus piranhas/chiming within/broken bones" (Conjured Talisman), "thinning/ossein to massage/scrim by which to scry/mutant shrapnel made" (Access Achieved Then Denied).
Weirdly beautiful language usage, full of surprises, twists and turns, and wordplay: language adroitly used, as in "Paradoxical Flight": "when a road kill/cat/black/silk cradles a/hyper notch/broken down/purring/crotch panel/rotting neural/blotch/an aural/round path/so partial/pussy extract/carefully oozing/from new particles/networks/jet stream/proving/an either or/model..."
Does it make sense to me? Hell, no. Does it matter? Again, no. As someone once said to the late Frank Sanford concerning his work, "I don't understand it, but I know what you mean."
These examples I've used should not be construed as representative of a flighty or loose style of writing because this is a disciplined work of serious stature also with an underlying structural design (3 "Acts"). I gather the last part of this statement intuitively and cannot say I have the slightest idea what the structure consists of. And you know what? It does not matter. This is a book to read and reread. A phantasmagorical journey where "Horses run through hoarse/barns. Hemlines narrow their slits." A book that asks such deep questions as "How do we engrave an orifice?" and answers "Coagulate all the swag/down our throats and then/gag ourselves..." Readers--enjoy."
:) )
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