Circles Matter by Brian Lucas

A triple play. Brian Lucas— painter, poet, musician—eye, heart, mind. Written with a sense of unfolding mystery, his voice on the page is sure in its tone, the ongoing quest and questioning is awake with profound and restless detail. Out of the ballpark. I await more.

— David Meltzer

Shock is the awe of reading—“a fable folded into sea.” The elemental act of reading is physical as well as chemical, a catalyst transforming the coastline of clouds into the graceful synaesthetic prosody of Circles Matter. The circles that matter are lines of approach, the “Contents” describing 25 poems and 3 drawings, from “Awe” to “Sketch of an Eclipse.” Brian Lucas’s elegant Circles Matter moves time, in time, “Never resting as ideal state.

—Norma Cole

The creative mind is a vast and never-still momentum of thoughts giving way to images and metaphors that, when followed, reveal paths connecting suns and cities, galaxies and cells. Brian Lucas has found a way to navigate the language of this complicated field in a way that fills the reader’s creative mind with the possibility of landscapes seen in trance-vision, or concepts like “each part is an illusion” understood as thoughts heard in rhythmic mythological time. Circles Matter, because “every brain has an inferno to occupy.

— Kristen Prevallet

While reading Circles Matter, a mirage of lines spins around me. I feel as if plunged into a teeming interregnum, where the invisible brews and comes back to itself through “boundary-less sensations.” These Circles are made of “clues… hidden in the songs sung.” After an indeterminate duration of contact with the text, I feel as if Brian Lucas has chanted a hive of codes beckoning through “yellow” “light.”

— Will Alexander

Brian Lucas was born in Visalia, California in 1970. His previous publications include Telepathic Bones (Berkeley Neo-Baroque, 2010), Light House (Meeting Eyes Bindery, 2006) and The Trustees in Spite of Themselves (Neko Buildings, 1999). He contributed drawings to Force Fields (Hooke Press, 2010), a collaboration with Andrew Joron. After several years living in Thailand, he now resides in Oakland, California where he plays in the spontaneous music ensemble Cloud Shepherd.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 100 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-093-4