This book starts out listening for bees, and hears none, the listener being something of a pupa in a cocoon on the early pages. Honeycombs begin not as sources of Swiftian sweetness and light, but sloughs of despond. Honeybees themselves, initially silent, burn like fire at the stake. The hive is the shadow of death, full of sand fleas that stand in for the desiderated insects, along with "scrubitch" mites, Hercules caterpillars and flies: electro-kinetic pellets flecking / blank walls. The planet and its atmosphere, thus un-beed, become a single organism whose surface swarms with flotsam, jetsam and scabs reincarnating as silverfish. Earth's innards comprise more non-beehives that pullulate instead with arachnids and microbes and single cells that Vincenz eventually nurtures to dinosaurhood. We get former human cultures who made hive-like arrangements: ...the Cucuteni-who incinerated their own homes before wandering on...Bajau Laut tribes of Semporna who built their homes on coral reefs in the ocean. And that settled ocean, as always in Vincenz, is near. It's the opposed cosmos, again not a social insect world, but buzzing with fish, not in shoals, not in pods, but singularly alone like us. However, complete solitude is not our lot, because the seashore is inhabited by a remarkable figure: beachcombing Ivan in his ragged rope belt. He recurs throughout Becoming the Sound of Bees, making sense, or nonsense, of everything: screaming blue at the sea, braving the heavy metals of that other social creature, the bedded oyster, his eyes watering as he surveys the city's polluted human hive. This new book by Marc Vincenz, through sheer dint of numberless invention, hums louder and more beautifully than any of our world's collapsing colonies. Tom Bradley

Becoming the Sound of Bees

Literature & Fiction

Vincenz, Marc

Poetry

Ampersand Books

About the author Marc Vincenz is Swiss-British, was born in Hong Kong, and currently divides his time between Zurich, Reykjavik and New York. His work has appeared in many journals, including Washington Square Review, Fourteen Hills, The Potomac, The Canary, Saint Petersburg Review, The Bitter Oleander, and Guernica. Recent collections include: The Propaganda Factory, or Speaking of Trees (2011); Gods of a Ransacked Century (Unlikely Books, 2013) and forthcoming, Beautiful Rush (Unlikely Books, 2014) and a meta-novel, Behind the Wall at the Sugar Works (Spuyten Duyvil, 2014). A new English-German bi-lingual collection, Additional Breathing Exercises is forthcoming from Wolfbach Verlag, Zurich (2014). Marc is Executive Editor of Mad Hatters' Review and MadHat Press and Coeditor-in-Chief at Fulcrum: an annual of poetry and aesthetics. Reviews "China throws long shadows. Somewhere between Mao's revelation of the use of the vast Chinese masses, and between Colonel Sanders and Steve Jobs' revelation of the same masses and their use, nothing happened. The masses died, mostly, quickly in battle or slowly by toxins, and the wisdom of monks in the caves stayed the same. The masses and the monks in their caves play an ancient game in Marc Vincenz verses, a complex game of poetry Go, born of the poet's encounter with real people who are at the same time a mass. China's paradoxes breathe in his poems." Andrei Codrescu, poet, novelist, essayist and screenwriter "Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent," says Mao. Marc Vincenz uses the Chairman as a guide in this Dantesque tour of China. A book that registers bewilderment and grit, a book that does not turn away. Probably the most realistic portrait of China I've ever read!" Terese Svoboda, poet, novelist, memoirist and translator "Mao's Mole is a must read if you want to know China, its past, present, and future. Marc has managed to enter the most guarded palace through a wormhole, and come out with abundant gifts. Beautiful, powerful, and entertaining all at once." Wang Ping, poet, novelist, translator and teacher

Mao's Mole

NeoPoiesis Press, LLC

In subtitling this book "A Divine Comedy," the poet Marc Vincenz brushes up against Dante, and yet he does so “in the pulse of a breath, /waiting for the rain / to wash away the dream.” There is light here―not perhaps the roseate of the Florentine retinue―but one we can use right now: “All visions / gone, but this, a world, / a world / dancing ahead.” Vincenz questions notions of humanity, the potency and power of language over time, implying perhaps that codes have driven us throughout history and that the emergence of the AI will yield the next stage in its evolution. After a long night of the soul, where formal religion yields to love and imagination, we emerge to a healing space that is both inner and outer, physical and spiritual. The Syndicate of Water &amp; Light gives us a sense that we can grow in knowledge and that we can change―if not, perhaps, the world, then at least within ourselves.

The Syndicate of Water & Light: A Divine Comedy

United States

AmazonUs/INDPB

The Pearl Diver of Irunmani

White Pine Press

Poetry. "The ambitious poems of Marc Vincenz don't fit into any poetic scene or aesthetic camp I can name--he is an internationalist, and his work mixes far-flung flavors: a little Hart Crane, a little Italo Calvino, a little Pavese...possibly a little Vallejo? These poems don't stand still, but rocket around, through tones that range from the highly romantic to the ironic to the analytic. They incorporate the vocabulary of chemistry, anthropology, and ecology--and marry it to flamboyant verbal stylistics. Vincenz seems unafraid of being exotic or abstruse, but his poetry is also soundly grounded in a recurrent emotional urgency, and by returning with great plainness to the irrefutable pain of the human condition." --Tony Hoagland

Leaning Into the Infinite

Dos Madres Press

An Alphabet of Last Rites

Cervena Barva Press

39 Wonders and Other Management Issues

Spuyten Duyvil Publishing

The King of Prussia is Drunk on Stars

Lavender Ink

The Mayfly Codex

Spuyten Duyvil

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Books by Vincenz, Marc