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
BlazeVOX24 Fall 2024
Table of Contents
Poetry
Geoffrey Gatza
Poetry Extra Extra
Charles Borkhuis
5 poems from a longer poem called POINT OF NO RETURN
Heller Levinson
4 poems from Crossfall, a new book coming out in spring 2025 from Black Widow Press.
Brenda Mann Hammack
Six Selections from "The Living Dead Woman Sonnets
Drama
Soft Opening
Kevin Thurston
Essay
Outside The Dream Syndicate
Joel Lewis
Text Art & Vispo
Jasper Glen
Three Vispo Pieces
Mark Young
Six Visual Pieces
Robert Fleming
Nine Visual Pieces
Serse Luigetti
Seven Text Art Pieces
Fiction
Carib Fire
Ajam Rosado
I Hope The Forest Fires Burn Up All The Ticks
Alex Rost
The Vending Machine
Alice Nord
The Argument for the Artist
David Halliday
A Stranger In These Woods
Elise McFarlane
Three Flash Fictions
Elijah Sparkman
Jurving
Dennis Jordan
The Unnamable
Geoff Wyss
Pact with Death
Marcelo Medone
The Transformation
Mark Higham
Three Flash Fictions
Robert Wexelblatt
Keep Your Enemies Close
William Luvaas
This Is How They Met
Wayne McCray
The Best of You To Love and the Worst of You To Hold
Zena Wronka
Acta Biographia — Author Biographies
Hello and welcome to the Spring 2024 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