Will Alexander

Refractive Africa

A Cannibal Explains Himself to Himself

Mary Ann Caws

Susan Lewis

Matthew Moore

Wayne Koestenbaum

Chris Campanioni

Tamas Panitz

Ghérasim Luca

Osvaldo Lamborghini

Léon-Paul Fargue

Ted Rees

Denise Newman

Evan Isoline

Sara Crangle

Joshua Bird

Billie Chernicoff

M. T. C. Cronin

Xeno Muir Pam Dick

Spencer Everett

Josh Fomon

Kirsten Ihns

Jack Jung

Jed Munson

Garrett Phelps

Genya Turovskaya

Utterance As a Fraught Passage: Aporia

Vestiges_06

""Yet the voice of Will Alexander, who here commemorates Lamantia in his pluperfect poem The Brimstone Boat, rose hardly more than a quarter century later... In this automatistically extended poem, we are witness to the passage of energies from the older to the younger poet, as Alexander charts Lamantia's life and writings across a Renaissance globe... It is here as well that Alexander succeeds Lamantia, who died in 2005, as America's greatest living surrealist poet--as the new poet at the helm on the brimstone boat, on a voyage of 'perpetual exploration.'""--ANDREW JORON The volume starts off with the 81 pages of the title poem, then 14 pages for three shorter poems, followed by 19 pages devoted to a glossary, then 50 pages for the content of four essays, and finally 3 pages of post-notes. On the cover, the frontispiece, and the end page, are three works by the American surrealist Marie Wilson; also included are eight pencil drawings by Will Alexander and two large photographs of Lamantia and Alexander.

The Brimstone Boat

Kaleidoscopic Omniscience is a new collection from lingual contortionist and poetic sage Will Alexander, featuring his early works - Asia & Haiti, The Stratospheric Canticles, and Impulse & Nothingness. Alexander's prismatic and oracular voice cascades around bi-geographic confrontations, painterly morphologies, and the cosmology of the void. " Alexander is] acutely conscious of the issue of poetic voice, and is unwilling to let poetry's potential for ventriloquizing or exploring the voices of others be subsumed in an impersonal criture or ultimately homogenous montage. He seems as well interested in the spiritual dimension of poetry, especially in the degrees to which poetry can give us access to spiritual or emotional states beyond those we normally experience." - Mark Scroggins, American Book Review

Kaleidoscopic Omniscience

Asia & Haiti presents two long poems by Los Angeles poet Will Alexander, which, in the broadest sense, are about the cultures, economics, politics, history, and social concerns of the title regions. Alexander's poetry presents a remarkable re-writing of a history. Caught up in the vortex of a surrealist vision and tornadoes of language, his words call up an American equivalent of Aime Cesaire.

Asia & Haiti

Poetry. African American Studies. This book of poetry by accomplished artist, novelist, playwright, and poet Will Alexander uses the language of science to address spiritual and personal revelations. Praising the figure "Solea," EXOBIOLOGY AS GODDESS is a love poem written in the specifics of the natural world. "William Blake merges with Sun Ra in the ecstatic flicker of evanescent transience. This work blazes with an holographic imaginary that is our only defense against the Dark."--Charles Bernstein

Exobiology as Goddess

Three kinetically distilled long poems by the singular American poet who “transfigures ‘thought’ into a weave of lexical magic” (Philip Lamantia) “The poet is endemic with life itself,” Will Alexander once said, and in this searing pas de trois, Refractive Africa: Ballet of the Forgotten, he has exemplified this vital candescence with a transpersonal amplification worthy of the Cambrian explosion. “This being the ballet of the forgotten,” he writes as diasporic witness, “of refracted boundary points as venom.” The volume’s opening poem pays homage to the innovative Nigerian-Yoruban author Amos Tutuola; it ends with an encomium to the modernist Malagasy poet Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo—two writers whose luminous art suffered “colonial wrath through refraction.” A tribute to the Congo forms the bridge and brisé vole of the book: the Congo as “charged aural colony” and “primal interconnection,” a “subliminal psychic force” with a colonial and postcolonial history dominated by the Occident. Will Alexander’s improvisatory cosmicity pushes poetic language to the point of most resistance—incantatory and swirling with magical laterality and recovery.

Refractive Africa is a set of three poems ruminating on diasporic witness, colonialism, invasion, and political resistance. This 'pas de trois' of poems begins paying homage to Amos Tutuola, innovative Nigerian-Yoruban author, and ends with a speech towards modernist Malagasy poet Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo. The collection turns around the long middle poem, using the geographical site of the Congo river as a lens for considering the pillaging and dislocation of societies through history, honing-in on the specific colonial and post-colonial histories of the area. He welds these to contemporary instances of ecological damage through mining for tin and cobalt. Fierce, compelling, and full of astrological reckoning, this book is a 'savage enunciation': 'this is the Congo vertiginous with derangement with its foul & delimited hygiene with its "weaver bird nests" with its sprawling grasslands with its "ghostly voltage" as flares from old oil rigs thus our intelligence forcibly blunted our thought stream injured as culpable integument within this compound negation terror persists snaking its way through interior suppression'

Ballet of the Forgotten

African American surrealism that extends from the ocean floor to the outer reaches of space.

City Lights Spotlight

Compression & Purity

How observant are you? There are 1,000,000 characters in play and you have to find the o amongst all the a's. Sound easy? Well, have you ever taken the time to consider what a million looks like? It's a lot! See how long it takes you to find the needle in a haystack and then challenge someone else to find it faster.

Find the O in the A's

One in a Million Puzzle

Poetry. African & African American Studies. "A long-distance runner extraordinaire, Will Alexander parses and devours information, code and arcana lest they parse and devour him, parse and devour us. What but deep seas and distant galaxies would make such a demand his extended soliloquies implicitly ask and overtly answer. These high-toned reflections and imprecations unfold in a march mode almost, an ever insistent rat-a-tat on the rim of a snare, flame and flame's gnarled ignition. Here wonder and menace meet and reconnoiter, a singular, major addition to an already singular, major body of work." --Nathaniel Mackey

The Combustion Cycle

Andrew Joron

"One of the most prolific and original figures in the field of contemporary literature, Will Alexander is known worldwide for his arresting explorations of European and Caribbean surrealism, postcolonial history, twentieth-century philosophy, and contemporary scientific theory. Here, Alexander undertakes nothing less than a redefinition of the essay form itself, opening an "artery of twilight" wherein aesthetic, political, historical, social, cultural, scientific, and theoretical discourses often become indistinguishable elements of a holistic investigation into the composition--or, re-composition--of the physical and metaphysical worlds. Singing in Magnetic Hoofbeat is an indispensable record of Alexander's thought, and confirms his reputation as one of the foremost exponents of Afro-futurist modernism."--P.[4] of cover.

Singing in Magnetic Hoofbeat

Poetics: flight across precipitous intransigence.--from Across the Vapour Gulf.

Across the Vapour Gulf

A volume of surrealist works by a Whiting Fellowship recipient follows a theme about the nature of an unwavering path and describes the voyage of a Sri Lankan sailor who beheads sea snakes on the Indian Ocean and encounters various African communities. Original.

The Sri Lankan Loxodrome

Black & White Paperback Edition.""'Spectral Hieroglyphics' is a timeless 'organic constellation' of poems on the unstoppable power of radical poetic vision...In this extraordinary troika of poems, Will Alexander not only shows the strong determination of three free minds to achieve a fully poetic way of life, he also demonstrates the actuality of their revolutionary visions...Alexander portrays these poets in the grandeur of their passionate ideas...Will Alexander revives these visions in a new myth for the future."" -Laurens Vancrevel, Foreword. Profusely illustrated by Rik Lina.

Will Alexander

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