Alpha Ruins was written as a collection of poems of sensual abstraction that attempts to advance the perimeters of a post-modern critical-lyric. The project was to create poems that work in the gap between the analytical, social, and semiotic concerns of contemporary language writing and that of a more dream-like, mythic, existential awareness of the body as an ontological presence in the writing process.

Alpha Ruins

Literature & Fiction

Borkhuis, Charles

Brokuis, Charles

Poetry

Bucknell Univ Pr

Poetry. "DISAPPEARING ACTS breaks new ground in Charles Borkhuis' ongoing examination of how language constitutes and is constituted by the performing body through a dialectic between image and utterance. Among my favorite moments here are the delirious syntax of the long poem 'Spasm' ('walk into my outline I disappear inside the / keeper's brain burrow deeper there until one / night he hears my voice as if it were his own') and 'Trace Elements,' a kind of postmortem aubade addressed to a listener named 'little tremble' with overtones simultaneously ominous and sympathetic 'I know you must / hear the inevitable crunch / of little teeth in the background.' Borkhuis' penchant for noir still flavors the pathos, but this book also demonstrates an expansion of his range into moments of generosity and something approaching exultation."&mdash;Tim Trace Peterson "In DISAPPEARING ACTS, comedy & tragedy are unmasked as the Marx Brothers&mdash;Groucho & Karl. Think: Kafka starring opposite Gloria Swanson in a remake of Sunset Boulevard for the Internet Age. Now you see it, now it sees you. Call the Roller of Big Cigars and bid him blow smoke in the face of the ontology police. After all, here we're talking 'subjectivity/ sans subject traveling the open circuit.' Yes, Borkhuis is at it again, dazzling us with another avant-garde page-turner, one where he's hitched his oxen to the oxymoron generator, tilling the fields with an equal dose of the marvelous and the macabre. Are you, dear reader, ready to reap this perfect collision of metaphysical inquiry with that of all of the conundrums of materiality? Now you see it, now it seizes you."&mdash;Noah Eli Gordon "In DISAPPEARING ACTS, Charles Borkhuis presents an eloquent manifesto of ontological stage craft. In nine sections, with no capitalization at all, a divided self voices meditations which concern a reality that he fears has become his past so rapidly only words can attach it to his consciousness. And words too readily reverse themselves, memory is retrieved but with static, and the dichotomy is all or nothingness. To be is to sound out in words; is cogitation, silent, being at all? Borkhuis has the courage of his discouragement. The voice is painfully serious, and the prosody is economical and without ornamentation. Uncertainty prevails. Discomfort is on stage. Is the reader the one on stage or the one in the audience? If there is any answer in DISAPPEARING ACTS, it is 'both.'"&mdash;John Godfrey

Disappearing Acts

Chax Press

Poetry. Art. FINELY TUNED STATIC by Charles Borkhuis, with paintings by John McCluskey, is a distinctively braided venture: a series of calls and responses between word and image that pairs poet Charles Borkhuis' glyphic, micro- narratives with painter John McCluskey's collaged, abstract surfaces constructed from vinyl paint, torn paper and board and represented in FINELY TUNED STATIC in 12 full- color plates. Charles Borkhuis, author of nine books of poetry and a playwright, engages with painter John McCluskey's scissored abstractions as mirrored planes that calls out the splinters that poetry makes of a tale. The resultant collaboration is a dyad consisting of centrifugal impulses arrayed in language along the torn shards of McCluskey's colors and form: The "...crimson field trembling." Borkhuis declares early on and "the sentence broken off at the lip" which puts the reader/viewer on alert that this is syntax of another order. Its inscribed articulation has arisen so as to "listen for your voice in the static." What proceeds from their discourse is not a set of parallel codes but an exchange of "song of the scissors...across the jagged chasm." The poem observes "tremulous detail" within ".a wound in the pigment." FINELY TUNED STATIC offers a dynamic force and counterforce of evinced vocabularies, each rearing towards a truth, a "body held together by a thousand cuts."

Finely Tuned Static

Lunar Chandelier Press

There are no illusions in the world of Charles Borkhuis. This is life without eyelids, and what we see is too disquieting for our own good, yet we can't look away. It's like film noir, whose frisson is a bad dream. Borkhuis’ work, though, is the zero hour. Sure, we can hit the bullseye at the amusement park, ring the bell. But we're just saps. Let’s face it, the real is not for sissies, or tough guys either. As for Borkhuis, his aim is dead on. Dead Ringer beckons us even when we'd better beg off, until we realize we’ve been living in his world without our knowing. Borkhuis’ poems exude their strange beauty. 
 —Burt Kimmelman 
 I’m often reminded, while reading Borkhuis’ work, of Derrida’s portmanteau word hauntology, a term which embodies the disjunction within being between presence and absence. 
 you can’t unfriend us the voices said we’re already your next thought 
 it’s true the present was already a memory 
 In this darkly introspective poetry, inner and outer, self and other, past and present bleed together. Dead Ringer is an unforgettable volume of indelible palimpsests. 
 —Tom Beckett

Dead Ringer

BlazeVOX Books

Rearview Mirror

In these two plays the quotidian is stretched to the breaking point by incandescent language, black humor, and the fallout from lucid dreams. Hamlet'ss Ghosts Perform Hamlet features a playwright haunted by a beehive of Hamlets and Ophelias. Sunspots: a photographer'ss dead wife leads him on a harrowing journey through hilariously nightmarish scenes of the New York underworld.

Mouth of Shadows: Hamlet's Ghosts Perform Hamlet & Sunspots

Dramas & Plays

Spuyten Duyvil

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