Joey Madia, New Mystics Reviews

(Subterranean Blue Poetry, 2020, www.subterraneanbluepoetry.com ) ISBN: 979-8654276247 “Loose Cannon”: an expression that derives from the danger posed by an unsecured cannon on the deck of a ship. Irish poet Michael McNamara’s newest collection plays on this definition. If he is the first to do so, I applaud him. The implications of this homonym certainly fit and the implications are profound. Edgar Allen Poe said that a novel is a cannon, while a short story is a rifle. But what of poetry? We might say that a collection is a cannon, while the individual poem is the rifle. Inserting the homonym, this loose canon of collected poetry can certainly do some damage: to the established canon and to our perceptions of time, place, and death. These themes, prevalent in McNamara’s work, are the primary reason I am deeply engaged with it. I recently reviewed his collection, This Transmission (Argotist Ebooks, 2019), a complex work on the amorphous nature of identity. As founding edi...

 (Naples, FL: Receive Joy Publishing, 2019), ISBN: 978-0-9988484-1-9 A number of years ago, when I was living on the beautiful Crystal Coast in the southern Outer Banks of North Carolina, an author client referred me to the writing team of Carisa Jones and Sylvia Lehmann, collectively known as Receive Joy. During a long lunch on the waterfront of my beloved Beaufort, we talked at length about their exciting work in positive thought and manifestation. By the end of the conversation, I had agreed to be the editor for their first book, Ask and You Shall Receive. A truly dynamic duo, I was most impressed with their energy, enthusiasm, deep belief in God and His Gifts, and their commitment to write the book using only positive words. During the course of my work with them, I attended several of their Miracle Group meetings and have since worked with them in other capacities. Between Ask and You Shall Receive and the current book, they have stayed active in their mission to t...

 (Burdett, NY: Larson Publications, 2007 [Orig. 1936, E.P. Dutton]). ISBN 978-0-943914-98-5 Paul Brunton, perhaps best known for his Short Path to Enlightenment and theories about the Oversoul, was an explorer, spiritualist, and thinker in the great tradition of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As humankind grappled with the Industrial Revolution and the question of the moral validity of Empire, Brunton and others like him sought to understand the varied religious, historical, and political systems of the world by experiencing them firsthand. Prior to going to Egypt, he traveled to India, writing the precursor to this volume. As Timothy J. Smith writes in the introduction, this journal is not only outward but an “inward journey of initiation.” When I first received it I anticipated a travelogue with valuable information about Egypt and its wonders through the lens of the 1930s. Although it is certainly that, detailed in its descriptions of buildings a...