Poetry. Through the tumult of our names, months, seasons, runs the line of the heart. The cordial, the central, the nerve that springs us into thinking, moving, speaking. Body, Speech, Mind—what else have we? The heart is the thread that links them together, the theme that runs through all the voices and variations of our fugue, our flight, our flight from Eden, from dependency, from servitude, towards freedom of mind and action. Towards being. I learned the name of the poem slowly, after hearing at Bard a performance of Lou Harrison's choral setting of the heart sutra, the radical Buddhist text that speaks to the primacy of mind. It made me think of the way Buddhists point to the heart to mean the mind. Sutra means thread, and that was my instruction, suddenly focused as I listened one afternoon to George Quasha's Axial Music ensemble in Barrytown, and I knew the name of the thread that held me, that I held.

Heart Thread

Literature & Fiction

Kelly, Robert

Poetry

Lunar Chandelier Collective

Poetry. "Chernicoff gives us a world set to work, process as alchemy, the chaos within order she manifests with her patient and alert naming 'Of.' She's not shapeshifting but involving us in the radical force of language that is the world. The child of Cupid and Psyche speaking at once from within, and beyond."—Tamas Panitz "The poems in WATERS OF are amazing lyrics that explore themes of change and the continual transformation of the present. These poems quietly build and flow, exploring the natural world, myths, the alchemical, different alphabets, literatures and cultures. Time and the changeable nature of life and all materials are at the center of this book; here Chernicoff's poems exemplify this transmutation in the accretions of her lines and images where each word is a drop 'at the root of all things.' In WATERS OF, the poet's capacious imagination and intelligence meet at the threshold where everything is possible.—Eléna Rivera "Almagest enough at last! For me, the greatest gift of WATERS OF is that it offers a way to hear all of history as just a complicated mechanism for us to make thous of each other, an attempt to bridge the huge gaps between the orders of our feelings. We get 'lost in streets whose leaves turn bronze / like the words of God,' and 'It takes heat to move / the sound of one / syllable / into what you can see / or touch,' but this book points a way home to water. Billie Chernicoff remembers the color into seeing, welcomes an ox into the house of the alphabet. When I read these poems, I feel a weird, thrilling awakeness. They sing the raucous music of who we've been."—Ian Dreiblatt

Waters Of

Chernicoff, Billie

Poetry. CALLS is the fifth and final volume in a cycle of long poems: Fire Exit, UNCERTAINTIES, The Hexagon, and HEART THREAD, collectively forming The Island Cycle, composed over the last decade. No narrative is delivered or implied; as with any actual cycle, the reader can begin anywhere.

Calls (Island Cycle)

Poetry. "The magic alphabet, the mysterious hieroglyph, have come down to us only in incomplete and distorted form, be it through the workings of time or of those who stand to profit from our ignorance; let us rediscover the lost letter or the vanished sign, let us recompose the dissonant scale, and we will gain strength in the world of spirits."--Gérard de Nerval

Vanished Signs

Wilson, Peter Lamborn

Poetry. "The poet reads things. And she knows them all, this poet of our precise and beautiful ordinary language. She handles them, fondles them even, with her eyes, eyes that traverse the salients and re-entrants of bronze artifacts with the fluid grace of a gymnast. That's what pleases me most in this wonderful poem, or book of poems, this living museum of human responses to human work--the quiet alertness of her breath, the way the lines let us travel with her perceptions, breathing for us almost, showing us how to see. Old bronze seen new. No hint of antiquarian scholarship here--the years fall away, leaving only the moss-green patina, time's only gift, green, color of Venus."--Robert Kelly "While Billie Chernicoff is a stunningly new poet, she is also one who brings multiple pasts &amp; presents into the work, with incredible grace and a feeling for image and sound that never lets up. Reading her now I sense the new and old worlds of my traditions and hers--ours--emerging through a voice that speaks genuine poetry as I want and need it. BRONZE is news that stays news, as someone once had it."--Jerome Rothenberg "Reading BRONZE, I am reminded of Charles Olson's notion of how 'the inner structure of language recapitulates the inner structure of the world.'...The poems project a slideshow of carefully etched images; a casting onto the mind through word and rhythm, a phanopoeia of the vessels and carvings. Indeed, the vector forces that come together to create these poems are in phase with one another--and it is with humor, sensuality, and play that they are revealed."--Kristin Prevallet "Here the unalloyed pleasure of significant soundings rubs up against the beauty of indestructible bronze, resulting in perfect pitch--ekphrasis as ecstasy, in vessels, busts, ewers, and urns, holding wine and song, ashes and a rumor, vanishing. These poems stick to the real like bronze sticks to the bone, 'and if you get cut / heal the blade.'"--David Levi Strauss

Bronze

Poetry. "SEASPEL is a mosaic. It is formed of shells of perception, sacred narratives well or ill remembered, glimpses of ocean, reminiscences about a great teacher and his students. In island folk art, mosaic images are made from fragments of all sorts of shell. Clam, oyster, scallop side by side--their origins do not matter, only shape and color--not the source, only the found fact. The poem itself tries to embody what the sea told me, the sea, the sea. The poem is dedicated to the memory of my teacher, Lama Norlha (Ngawang Geleg, the second Norla Rinpoche), 1938-2018, founder of the first Vajrayana seminaries in America, guide, sustainer, friend."--Robert Kelly

Seaspel

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Lunar Chandelier Collective publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.