An intense “marvelous and fateful game,” Spectral Pegasus / Dark Movements brings to the page a six-month blogosphere collaboration between Welsh painter Clive Hicks-Jenkins and American poet Jeffery Beam, depicting a Hero’s journey through death, resurrection, psychological and spiritual trials, and revelations into redemptive vision. Originating loosely in an ancient Welsh folk tradition and the death of the painter’s father, painter and poet marry their impressive powers of myth and dream into individual but sympathetically resonant designs—inward landscapes wrought startlingly real—at turns plain and flamboyant, poignant and joyful. “The grace of these paintings and poems is in their wildness,” fashioned ultimately by Hicks-Jenkins’ and Beam’s compassionate confrontation with dark forces, reviving forgotten knowing and healing powers, as pilgrim/hero meets Horse/Man, thus “patching up some almighty fear in the fabric of heaven” and the searching self. Features twenty-one full color illustrations, sixteen poems, and illuminating essays by Sarah Parvin, Mary-Ann Constantine, and Claire Pickard. Book design by J.C. Mlozanowski.

Spectral Pegasus / Dark Movements

Arts & Photography

Beam, Jeffery

Individual Artists

Kin Press

Is there such a thing as a 'poet's novel, ' a text which uniquely traverses boundaries between genres? Why do poets turn to prose? If such a form does exist, how is it characterized? The Poet's Novel, a talk by Laynie Browne, presented with drawings by Noah Saterstrom, examines this erratic, hybrid and often elusive form. Writers discussed include Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, and Lydia Davis, among others. Poet and novelist Laynie Browne is the editor of a forthcoming collection of essays, A Forest on Many Stems: Essays on the Poet's Novel.

The Poet's Novel as a Form of Defiance: Indeterminate Frame

Literature & Fiction

Browne, Laynie

History & Criticism

In the spring of 2016, Ted Greenwald and Kyle Schlesinger began a poetic postcard collaboration comprised of three lines per card. The goal was not to produce a direct call and response, but rather to let the chips fall where they may and arrange the poem chronologically. None of Us is not only an exploration of chance and synchronicity, but an experience in free-association and imagined dialogues.

None of Us

Greenwald, Ted

Schlesinger, Kyle

Reminiscent of Eastern Bhakti love poetry, and Western Troubadour and Green Man traditions, Verdant recounts a mid-life passage within a shadowed natural landscape of intense physical and spiritual longing. At the age of 42, queer poet Jeffery Beam fell in love with a younger man, threatening his then 15-year relationship. These poems were born of that spiritual alchemical blaze, and its substantial healing power. The poet-lover's sacred quest through heartbreak, suffering, grief, and regret, progresses ultimately to a joyful ecstatic reunion with the Beloved Divine. A mini-essay, "Don't Forget Love: Sacred Longing's Dark Project," further illuminates the actual, mythological, and spiritual origins of the poems, and describes the poet's lifetime search through experience, teachings, and literature, to a condition in which Desire and Love enrich instead of subsume the Self.

Verdant

Poetry

In his latest collection of poems, British poet and playwright Tony Connor vividly recreates scenes based his childhood, or childhoods--remembered, imagined, and invented--as he grew up in a working-class neighborhood of Manchester, England in the 1930s.

A Century of Childhoods

CONNOR, Tony