Lexicartographies by Nicholas Alexander Hayes

Nicholas Alexander Hayes's Lexicartographies feels like a microscopic look at an ever-shifting organism, with language serving as a tool for mapping out its evolution and tiniest particles, both fragile and brutal in their raw, naked reality. The sight is as fascinating and awe inspiring as it is disturbing as we glimpse ourselves ‒ our own inescapable nature as biological beings shaped by our desires, history and myths. An extraordinary feat of poetry and form.

Dominik Miles, editor of SCAB

Once upon a time, in a natural history museum, a young girl strode into a hall devoted to a skeletal replica of a massive titanosaur—a Cretaceous sauropod— and exclaimed, “Oh my gosh, a lobster!” And thus the beast coupled with the girl’s word and born was a new animal, a new phylogeny, and a new way to understand evolution. Lexicartographies repeats that moment on every page, uncovering for us the heretofore invisible undefinitions of words, while reminding us that language is as biological as anything else we do—eat, copulate, excrete—and that we live, always, “between citadel and buttocks.”

Eric Elshtain, Field Museum Poet-in-Residence

Nicholas Alexander Hayes lives in Chicago, Illinois. He is the author of several books and chapbooks including Buttered Hair (Ghost City Press), Bliss (Alien Buddha Press), and Ante-Animots: Idioms and Tales (BlazeVOX). In 2019, his collection Amorphous Organics shared the James Tate International Poetry Prize. His work has been featured in the anthologies Contemporary Surrealist and Magical Realist Poetry: An International Anthology; Lovejets: Queer Male Poets on 200 Years of Walt Whitman; and Madder Love: Queer Men and the Precincts of Surrealism.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 120 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-434-5