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
BlazeVOX21 Spring 2021
Table of Contents
Poetry
Fiction & Prose
Alex Clermont — Small Steps
Alexandra Persad — First Frost
Clement Joseph Haan — May
Gregory Kanhai — Purgation 24
Judith Goode — Around Robin Hood’s Barn
Niles Reddick — Elevator Ride
Ralph Bland — Wherefore
Ronald Fink — Tinnitus
Sarah M. Prindle — The Spear
Shambhavi Roy — Houseflies
William L. Alton — Get Better or Die
Poetry in Translation
Ian Haight — Co-translations of the Korean poet Nansŏrhŏn
(her penname, White Orchid)
Dmitry Blizniuk — Two poems translated by Sergey Gerasimov from Russian
Text Art & Vispo
Pamela Miller — 5 visual poems
hiromi suzuki — Waiting for a Lock to Open
Meranda Pfamatter— Sitting in an Office
Acta Biographia — Author Biographies
Hello and welcome to the Spring 2021 issue of BlazeVOX! Presenting fine works of poetry, fiction, text art, visual poetry and arresting works of creative non-fiction written by authors from around world. Do have a look through the links below or browse through the whole issue in our Scribd embedded PDF, which you can download for free and take it with you anywhere on any device. Hurray!
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