Literary Nonfiction. African American Studies. MIRACH SPEAKS TO HIS GRAMMATICAL TRANSPARENTS is a philosophical meditation vertically scripted. It is an extension of Alexander's first book in this mode, TOWARDS THE PRIMEVAL LIGHTNING FIELD. Both books, in concert, exist as a double exploration in what, for the author, is a nascent odyssey, concerning the mind at non-limit through cellular transmogrification.

Mirach Speaks To His Grammatical Transparents

Alexander, Will

Literature & Fiction

Oyster Moon Press

""Yet the voice of Will Alexander, who here commemorates Lamantia in his pluperfect poem The Brimstone Boat, rose hardly more than a quarter century later... In this automatistically extended poem, we are witness to the passage of energies from the older to the younger poet, as Alexander charts Lamantia's life and writings across a Renaissance globe... It is here as well that Alexander succeeds Lamantia, who died in 2005, as America's greatest living surrealist poet--as the new poet at the helm on the brimstone boat, on a voyage of 'perpetual exploration.'""--ANDREW JORON   The volume starts off with the 81 pages of the title poem, then 14 pages for three shorter poems, followed by 19 pages devoted to a glossary, then 50 pages for the content of four essays, and finally 3 pages of post-notes. On the cover, the frontispiece, and the end page, are three works by the American surrealist Marie Wilson; also included are eight pencil drawings by Will Alexander and two large photographs of Lamantia and Alexander.

The Brimstone Boat

Poetry

Rêve à Deux

Black & White Paperback Edition."'Spectral Hieroglyphics' is a timeless 'organic constellation' of poems on the unstoppable power of radical poetic vision...In this extraordinary troika of poems, Will Alexander not only shows the strong determination of three free minds to achieve a fully poetic way of life, he also demonstrates the actuality of their revolutionary visions...Alexander portrays these poets in the grandeur of their passionate ideas...Will Alexander revives these visions in a new myth for the future." -Laurens Vancrevel, Foreword. Profusely illustrated by Rik Lina.

Spectral Hieroglyphics: The One True Body, At the Vertigo Borders, On Higher Phlogiston Current

Poetry. THE AUDIOGRAPHIC AS DATA is none other than telepathic conundrum. It is language that renders the visible as invisible and the invisible as visible thus, transmuting both states into incalculable presence.

The Audiographic As Data

Lara, Carlos

A mesmerizing poetry collection by “an ecstatic surrealist on imaginal hyperdrive” (Eliot Weinberger). the maps one comes to know are but boulders which are shattered by spoilage ―Will Alexander In navigation a loxodrome, or rhumb-line, is a line that crosses all meridians at the same angle, maintaining one compass direction, a path of constant bearing. In his breakthrough poetry collection, The Sri Lankan Loxodrome, Will Alexander connects this theme to a lone Sri Lankan sailor who beheads sea snakes as an ongoing meditation while sailing the expanse of the Indian Ocean. Along the way he meets various African communities as he journeys eastward, from Madagascar to Sri Lanka. In lush, perfumed language filled with the spirit of Aimé Césaire and Sun Ra, Alexander maps an epic voyage unlike any other in contemporary poetry.

The Sri Lankan Loxodrome

New Directions

Poetics: flight across precipitous intransigence.--from Across the Vapour Gulf.
In Will Alexander’s work, “Every poem reads like a subversive, alchemical wonder. It is tempting to label Alexander a surrealist or experimentalist, but he is truly a singular voice” (Jackson Poetry Prize citation).
Composed and collected by slow accretion over the span of thirty years, Across the Vapour Gulf opens with a note by the poet: “When I first laid eyes on the writing of Cioran I was smitten by the form. The aphorism seemed cleansed of detritus―in Cioran's hands, it seemed to spontaneously ignite. Poetry, history, philosophy, the essay, medicinally combined, appearing on the other side of itself as insight. Reading Cioran opened an unexpected neural pathway, opening the way for the composition of the compilation at hand. Each entry was instantaneous. They welled up and appeared with such astonishing alacrity, that they seemed to compose themselves practically fully formed.”

Across the Vapour Gulf (New Directions Poetry Pamphlets)

"The poet is endemic with life itself," Will Alexander once said, and in this searing pas de trois, Refractive Africa: Ballet of the Forgotten, he has exemplified this vital candescence with a transpersonal amplification worthy of the Cambrian explosion. "This being the ballet of the forgotten," he writes as diasporic witness, "of refracted boundary points as venom." The volume's opening poem pays homage to the innovative Nigerian-Yoruban author Amos Tutuola; it ends with an encomium to the modernist Malagasy poet Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo--two writers whose luminous art suffered "colonial wrath through refraction." A tribute to the Congo forms the bridge and brisé vole of the book: the Congo as "charged aural colony" and "primal interconnection," a "subliminal psychic force" with a colonial and postcolonial history dominated by the Occident. Will Alexander's improvisatory cosmicity pushes poetic language to the point of most resistance--incantatory and swirling with magical laterality and recovery.

Refractive Africa

The fifth volume of our Spotlight poetry series, Compression &amp; Purity is a new collection of poetry by Los Angeles–based African American surrealist Will Alexander. Known for densely textured visionary epics influenced by poets like Aimé Césaire and César Vallejo, Alexander here returns to shorter forms to address his ecological, cosmological, and historical concerns. Highlights include a monologue from the perspective of "The Blood Penguin," a song by the "New Water on Mars," and Alexander's autobiographical lyric essay, "My Interior Vita," describing the evolution of his artistic consciousness through jazz and surrealism. Compression &amp; Purity confirms Alexander's reputation among surrealism's foremost contemporary practitioners.

Compression & Purity (City Lights Spotlight, 5)

City Lights Publishers

From Will Alexander, finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, a new collection of poems from the intersection between surrealism and afro-futurism, where Césaire meets Sun Ra. Divine Blue Light further affirms Alexander’s status as one of the most unique and innovative voices in contemporary poetry. 
One of Publishers Weekly’s Top 10 Notable Poetry Books for Fall 2022! 
“Since the 1980s, the Los Angeles-based Alexander has mixed politics with mesmeric, oracular lines.”—The New York Times 
Against the ruins of a contemporary globalist discourse, which he denounces as a “lingual theocracy of super-imposed rationality,” Will Alexander’s poems constitute an alternative cartography that draws upon omnivorous reading—in subjects from biology to astronomy to history to philosophy—amalgamating their diverse vocabularies into an impossible instrument only he can play. Divine Blue Light is anchored by three major works: the opening “Condoned to Disappearance,” a meditation on the heteronymic exploits of Portuguese modernist Fernando Pessoa; the closing “Imprecation as Mirage,” a poem channeling an Indonesian man; and the title poem, an anthemic ode to the jazz saxophonist John Coltrane. Other key pieces include “Accessing Gertrude Bell,” a critique of one of the designers of the modern state of Iraq; “Deficits: Chaïm Soutine & Joan Miró,” in homage to two Jewish artists forced to flee the Nazi invasion of France; and “According to Stellar Scale,” a compact lyric that traveled to space with astronaut Sian Proctor. The newest installment in our Pocket Poets Series, Divine Blue Light confirms Alexander’s status among the foremost surrealists writing in English today. 
Praise for Divine Blue Light: 
"Adopting a surrealist approach to making sense of the universe, Alexander plumbs language for its limits, often with dazzling results....Pondering the mysteries of existence and artistic influence, this engrossing work turns the quest for self-knowledge into a choral act."—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review\n"Alexander’s range—which moves past the propriety of each subject to the expansiveness of every—can be approximated as Aimé Césaire’s totality of the lion, or form and emptiness, or appositional, apparitional Black being. And this being is most real and realized through the collection’s quantum mechanics and dynamics, which Alexander invokes astrophysically, evokes metaphysically."—Jenna Peng, The Poetry Foundation\n"These surrealist and Afrofuturist poems examine politics, globalism, and the powers and limitations of language, while paying tribute to artists forced to flee the Nazi invasion of France.”—Maya Popa, Publishers Weekly\n"The 'invisible current' Will Alexander channels in the meteoric poems of Divine Blue Light is not surreal escape but vibrational engagement—an engagement with the infinite streams of the heart of being."—Jeffrey Yang, author of Line and Light 
"Like agua tilting itself into a god, Will’s texts suffuse the horizon of Poetry with the abstract purity of their oceanic movements, sun-condensing, dissolving seemingly endless sight into a disappearing instant of the Miraculous. Divine Blue Light exists by what it exudes."—Carlos Lara, author of Like Bismuth When I Enter

Divine Blue Light (For John Coltrane): Pocket Poets Series No. 63 (City Lights Pocket Poets Series, 63)

"One is never trapped by what seems better or worse, but one simply exists, curiously rising above surrounding tarnish and ailment, listening to oneself via voiceless alchemical mirrors." From King Leopold's atrocities in the Congo to modern-day American consumerism, Will Alexander's THE CONTORTIONIST WHISPERS examines a poet's role across space and time as a lingual power, a "practitioner of occult harvests," recruiting and combining the former insights of many--William Blake, Fernando Pessoa, Aimé Césaire, Alfonsina Storni, Jayne Cortez, Antonin Artaud--into one momentously moving effort to move beyond both being and nothingness. 
Literary Nonfiction. Poetry.

The Contortionist Whispers (Salvo, 5)

Biographies & Memoirs

Action Books

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