Joey Madia, New Mystics Reviews

(Press of the 3rd Mind, Chicago, 2012, ISBN: 978-0-9800257-3-9) On the last page of this brand new First Edition, there is an opportunity for readers to write in for free samples of collections by such well-known independent poets as Bradley Lastname, Eric Johnt, Robert Pomerhn, and Patrick Porter. In the past nine years I have reviewed several of the works listed. I recommend them all and any other titles you can acquire from this Chicago-based small press, because quality and relevancy are guaranteed. With this in mind, I was honored to have received an advance copy of Carli’s book and it didn’t disappoint. Being a college teacher of film, literature, and humanities as well as a reviewer of film and art and collaborative performance artist, Carli is a poet that unapologetically tells it like he sees it, dissecting from his own multi-faceted and hyper-personal perspective such topics as literary academia, Death, the personalities of the Chicago poetry scene, reality vs. illusion in nu...

(Burning Bulb Publishing, 2010, ISBN: 9781453844854) I’ve always enjoyed just a little more works of fiction that take place in locales with which I am familiar. It adds something special when I can not only visualize a place, but have actually been there. Having lived and traveled extensively in the northern half of West Virginia since moving here a little over four years ago, I found the locales in which Vincent places his vampires to be perfectly suited to both their peculiar sensibilities and those of their typical victims. Darkened Hills is the first installment of Darkened—The West Virginia Vampire Series (the second book, Darkened Hallow, is now available. It’s sitting on my shelf, ready to be read). It is the 2010 Book of the Year Winner from ForeWord Reviews Magazine and shares a publisher, Burning Bulb, with The Big Book of Bizarro, which I also recently reviewed. Vincent was a contributing editor. He has published several non-fiction books as well as the novel Passageway and...

(2011, Burning Bulb Publishing, www.burningbulbpublishing.com) by Joey Madia This ambitious collection of over 50 “bizarro” tales, edited by West Virginia authors Rich Bottles Jr. and Gary Lee Vincent, is divided into three sections: Horror, Sci-Fi/Fantasy, and Erotica. There are many definitions for the ever-evolving genre of “Bizarro,” including one in the book, although I define it simply as taking graphic violence and erotica a little further than the mainstream would and then, once it’s there, pushing it just a little further. The potential problem with this approach is that the violence and erotica wind up at times as being the whole point of the work, and there is no story; no craft. To the editors’ credit, there are few stories in this collection that fall into that trap and they stick out like a severed, rotting, puss-running thumb that had previously been up to no good in someone child’s back end (see how Bizarro works?). In this reviewer’s opinion, the strongest...

(il piccolo editions by Fisher King Press, 2010, ISBN: 978-1-926715-05-6) It has been a couple of years, since my review of Ed Baker’s Restoration Poems, that I have felt so moved by the prayer that a poem can be and the soul-bearing, soul-reaching prayerbook that is the rare collection such as this. Lowinsky’s history is complicated and rich. Many of her family members were lost to the concentration camps of World War II Europe. She is the granddaughter of painter Emma Hoffman, whose watercolor of her Berkeley home graces Adagio and Lamentation’s cover. She has endured (more than?) her share of hurt and grief and pain. And yet these larger circumstances—the mix of tragedy and triumph through the healing that is Art well made and selflessly shared—matter less in the scope of the selections than the Little Things—moments and minor memories; love and its loss; affairs and adjustments. There is, of course, because of her grandmother’s craft, the taking of inspiration from visual art, but ...

(the Press of the 3rd Mind, Chicago, Illinois, 2011) I was first introduced to Bradley Lastname through his role as publisher of the early books of Patrick Porter and Robert Pomerhn through Press of the 3rd Mind, books they each sent me for review. This was early in the new millennium, when I was doing a lot of poetry writing, mail art, and corresponding with fertile-field poets like Ric Carfagna, Mark Sonnefeld, Joseph Verilli, and Vernon Frazer. I first experienced Bradley’s writing when I was asked to review the first volume of Letterhead (Highest Hurdle Press, 2007), which was in part a tribute to Harvey Goldner, a mentor of Pomerhn’s. Lastname and his co-editors also produced a second volume of Letterhead, in which some of my own work appeared. Before starting Press of the 3rd Mind in 1985, Lastname published 25 issues of the acclaimed BILE Dadazine dating from 1978 to 1984. In addition to publishing over ten books of poetry and prose, he is a painter, sculptor, and collagist and ...

(2011, Llewellyn Worldwide, www.llewellyn.com) The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing. — Socrates There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.—Hamlet, Act I, sc. v The Vengeful Djinn, by two scientifically minded experts in the fields of the paranormal and supernatural, is an important contribution to the ongoing pursuit of answers about the Unknown, an often attacked but nevertheless serious undertaking that attracts controversy and derision from both within its ranks and without. Guiley and Imbrogno cover a large swath of study and territory in the book’s 260 pages, which include two appendices, a bibliography, and an index. They begin with a detailed and yet well-explained tutorial on quantum physical aspects of alternate realities and the idea of the multiverse, including “string theory,” setting up with science the plausibility of the djinn dwelling in a parallel plane to ours, which allows them to interact with us without...

Fisher King Press, March 2011, ISBN: 978-1-926715-13-1, fisherkingpress.com Snakes, a novel is the second book by Jungian analyst Patricia Damery. Her first, Farming Soul: A Tale of Initiation (2010), shares as its prima materia her Midwest background and the demise of the family farm, an action of modern life that scars the soul as well as the land. Two things strike me as notable about Snakes: First, it is written as an open letter to the narrator’s recently deceased father, but in such a subtle way that we as readers do not feel like eavesdroppers but invited listeners. Second, the book employs numerous metaphors (the farm, the sea, weaving, and, of course, snakes), which often marks the work of the amateur who cannot make decisions, leading to an incoherent book with no thru-line. Nothing here could be further from the truth. Perhaps it is the skill required by the high craft of weaving that allows Damery to write multi-metaphorically, or the sheer simplicity of her storytelling. T...

(Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2011, ISBN: 978-1-84861-143-6) Eileen Tabios is an innovator in the best sense of the word. If her impressive list of publications, multi-media projects, and awards were not proof enough, one need only consider her development and promotion of the Hay(na)ku form, which has spawned three anthologies and several works from individual writers. If even that is not enough, one would be hard pressed to discount her place at the forefront of the post-postmodern language and literature movement after reading (and engaging with) Silk Egg. Having read many and reviewed several of Tabios’ works, I have been most impressed and enthused by the requirements made on the reader (or reviewer) to partner in the product being created. This, to me, is what keeps the very short “novels” (and their even shorter chapters) from being just another experiment in what is alternately called, among other names, “Nano-fiction,” “microfiction,” and “flash fiction…” This growing movement of ...

(2009, Fisher King Press, www.fisherkingpress.com, ISBN 978-0-9810344-4-7) Reviewed by Joey Madia Eighteen months ago, I reviewed Dr. Staples’s Guilt with a Twist, a book with which I had some reservations. In the case of The Creative Soul (subtitled “Art and the Quest for Wholeness”), a relatively short book (91 pages including the Index), he has expanded on my favorite section of Guilt, dealing with the process of creativity as it applies to mental health and the integration of the Shadow, a core idea in the work and writings of Carl Jung (Staples is a Jungian analyst who trained in Switzerland after making a mid-life career-switch at the age of 50). 
 Inherent in the process of integrating one’s Shadow is the first step of acknowledging that it exists and exploring the push and pull of opposites at play within us all. It is this dynamic tension between good and evil, light and dark, loyalty to other and loyalty to self that feeds and fuels our creative impulses. For those whose deni...