Joey Madia, New Mystics Reviews

At the core of this hour-long visual–aural post-postmodern mind-jazz journey is John Gartland reading selected poems from his Five Books of Inundations , supported by a high-speed, trance-inducing barrage of techno beats and a far-ranging, superbly subliminal eye-feast of images. The whole thing opens with white letters on a black screen: Airstrip Featuring John Gartland overlaid with the sound of an airplane taking off. Other title cards appear along the way, tracking the trip, Phnom Penh to Bangkok, with changes in music and vertigo and vibe to sometimes support and sometimes glean additional meaning by working counter to Gartland’s text. Gartland, an ex-pat poet and teacher living in Thailand whose novels and books of poetry I’ve enjoyed and reviewed many times over the past decade, begins to speak, his voice at first electronically altered. As the early words implant in our ears we hear underlaid techno-dance boom-boom beats and see in a small square field a series of ...

 (Frog in the Mirror Press, 2019). ISBN: 978-0-692-19767-7 (paperback) You never know where the connections you make in life will lead. Simply saying yes to opportunity, out of curiosity or even as a courtesy, can open doors to whole new worlds, whole new places, that you never knew existed. In the twenty-first century, where everything is divided into Us and Them and the Other might as well live in another solar system where their rituals and culture are uber-alienated by some shadowy cabal that has engineered itself to make such decisions, feeding them down through indoctrinal water-drips to the TV-zombied hamster-people, it is imperative to learn about other places, other sub-sets of society. And to learn about and from what occupies the time of the thinkers and artists that reside there. For this reason alone, Different Drummers is a primer on Thailand and an invaluable read. So… that saying yes I mentioned. It happened a decade ago, when I received John Gartland’s ...

“Bangkok Shadow and Light”: A Review of John Gartland (poetry) and Mark Desmond Hughes (photography) Blanc et Noir: Masters of Noir 2 (Lizardville Productions, 2016) A few months ago I had the pleasure of reviewing John Gartland’s Resurrection Room: Bangkok dark rhetoric , a complex, riveting piece that seamlessly blended sardonic autobiography and social commentary with fantastical leaps through time and subject-space. Blanc et Noir operates as a companion piece and, although it showcases Gartland’s poetry (as did sections of Resurrection Room ), it comes at its subject matter—Bangkok and environs and the myriad personalities who populate this space—from a series of different angles. It is no less (and at times more so) sharp and biting than its predecessor. Add in the stunning and at times disturbing photography of Mark Desmond Hughes and the written/visual cocktail is both potent and lasting. Gartland knows Story, and talks of it often in his poetry and prose. The opening l...

 (Lizardville Productions, 2016) “One night in Bangkok and the world's your oyster/The bars are temples but the pearls ain't free’You'll find a god in every golden cloister/And if you're lucky then the god's a she/I can feel an angel sliding up to me” (“One Night in Bangkok,” Chess ) There are cities in the world that pulse with a deep mystique: the sleepless dichotomies of New York; the romanticism of Paris for lover and writers; the foggy Victorian mystery of London… the list goes on and on. Bangkok (Thailand) conjures images of crowded streets full of steaming food, rickshaw drivers, and exotic women finger-motioning from alleyways and doorways… and Resurrection Room takes these images wider and deeper than perhaps your average reader wants to go. Which makes it essential reading. Gartland—a true Renaissance man known in writers’ circles as the “Poet Noir”—pulls no punches. In his several books of poetry, his misericordia-sharp Facebook posts, and his...