BlazeVOX an.online.journal.of.voice

Presenting fine works of poetry, fiction, text art, visual poetry and arresting works of creative non-fiction written by authors from around world

BlazeVOX11 Spring 2011

Welcome to Spring! Or so it says in the calendar, but it is storming violently outside now. Eliot comes to mind, as it was sunny and beautiful last week and now the aluminum porch rooftop is drumming with sleet, hail, rain and thundering snowfall. It’s really ghastly out there, but if this is what nature needs to make it into Spring, to grow new greeneries, then rain on! There is nothing one can do about weather other than stay inside and wait until the sun shines. Spring can be as terrifying as dark dreary winter; there are swirling tornadoes, tsunamis and new Chernobyl’s; more war, more money for gasoline and more wild ideas. And yet we writers persist, we keep on working our poetry and our stories and continue to read our poems and it is all rather exciting. There is a lot of work out there for poetry and in this issue we present a glimmering sliver of that shining potential. In this great new issue we have fifty-five poets and eleven prose pieces. Also we have two new ebooks and our running series, buffaloFOCUS features Shinwell Johnson. 

A whole new look for the elevenzies 

If you have not noticed, then let me tell you about the whole new outlook for BlazeVOX. Just about everything has changed since our last issue. We have a new physical location, a new logo for the press, a whole new website, a new blog and a new store. To begin with, we moved from our old home about a mile down the road, a bit closer to downtown Buffalo, New York, than we previously did. It is a lovely location, wonderful being able to walk to poetry events and poets homes as we now live closer to them and the scene, as it were. It is great fun, spacious place and most important, I have an office in our new apartment. So hurray for that!

Our new site is just extraordinary! Do have a look around and please visit our new store! We have all of our books on display in an easy to use format. We now have a direct connection to a Look Inside feature for all, well most, of our books. You can now buy books directly from us! This is a great new way for us to directly share our fine books with you, our dear audience! Hurray! We have a New Release section that will tell you all about our new books so you can stay up to date with all of the great books we have to offer. And in our art gallery we have an offering of podcasts and a display of 100 of our coolest covers. We will be revolving our galleries so do keep an eye on this section!  

Our new logo is plastered all over the site so you probably won’t miss it :-) We have just honed in our look to keep up with the fashions of our new decade. Look forward to new features at BlazeVOX blog. We’ll be featuring poems from our books on a regular basis as well as updates on BlazeVOX books being reviewed and current author news. And we’ll be featuring new ebooks this year! We have two new offering in this issue from a book of three stories by Chuck Richardson and poetry matched with art by Felino A. Soriano & Constance Stadler! So what more can you ask for, it’s all free and without commercials! Plus we receive no funding from any government or agency! So please enjoy! And should you feel so moved as to donate to BlazeVOX by all means do so!

Hurray and Happy Spring!

Rockets, Geoffrey

Geoffrey Gatza
Acting Editor

IntroductionIntroduction

In this issue we seek to avoid answers but rather to ask questions. With a subtle minimalistic approach, this issue of BlazeVOX focuses on the idea of ‘public space’ and more specifically on spaces where anyone can do anything at any given moment: the non-private space, the non-privately owned space, space that is economically uninteresting. The works collected feature coincidental, accidental and unexpected connections, which make it possible to revise literary history and, even, better, to complement it.

Combining unrelated aspects lead to surprising analogies these piece appear as dreamlike images in which fiction and reality meet, well-known tropes merge, meanings shift, past and present fuse. Time and memory always play a key role. In a search for new methods to ‘read the city’, the texts reference post-colonial theory as well as the avant-garde or the post-modern and the left-wing democratic movement as a form of resistance against the logic of the capitalist market system.

Many of the works are about contact with architecture and basic living elements. Energy (heat, light, water), space and landscape are examined in less obvious ways and sometimes develop in absurd ways. By creating situations and breaking the passivity of the spectator, he tries to develop forms that do not follow logical criteria, but are based only on subjective associations and formal parallels, which incite the viewer to make new personal associations. These pieces demonstrate how life extends beyond its own subjective limits and often tells a story about the effects of global cultural interaction over the latter half of the twentieth century. It challenges the binaries we continually reconstruct between Self and Other, between our own ‘cannibal’ and ‘civilized’ selves. Enjoy!

Rockets! Geoffrey Gatza, editor

Previous

BlazeVOX @ Burchfield Penney 2011
Next

BlazeVOX 2kX Fall 2010