An original progression of The New Goth with elements of horror and classical images caught inside absurdist theatre,
[RE] COLLECTION OF THE [UN] LIKELY by Dani Ferrara, Gabrielle Lessans and Trainwreck Press. The chapbook is in classical form,
strikes a vellum chord with a cream cover (the art/photo of a girl portrait in sepia by Enrique Meseguer) and the crisp elegance
of white pages with black type. Ferrara and Lessans are poets and teachers. They have founded the Nocturne School of Lucid Writing
and teach poetry workshops/ “memory care poetics” to college students and seniors.
This Chapbook recreates the experience of poetry in an exciting original avante garde New Art form. Each page of poetry is titled
with “THEOREM:” and a subtitle, an enigmatic introduction to the poem of that page, an in context, out of context reel. The oeuvre
is a certain sang-froid, a spiraling of darkness. A very dissociated presentation, a presentation of broken, broken psyche,
perhaps broken love affair(s) that haunt. The idea of space and dislocation, the language is truncated, nonsensical with made up
words, spaces between letters, the number “0” and words that suggests a certain violence, a fire. The writing is often
incomprehensible, drifts and bangs, often as if the voice of the work is drowning, in parts as if a death rattle. The images are
of nature, borrowing from a very broken romanticism, a word, “conch”, “beanpod” no description, coached in a backdrop of melee.
From “THEOREM: The Dream Is A Meeting Place”
she measures her body to a cross
piece obsessed
by mauve
by
sill
sill
sallow
dusky
waters
the silence
off encounter
The words, sometimes split words, letters travel across the page like a pictograph, giving spaces, giving breath giving breath stopped
short. Often it is nonsensical, the write suggests conflict.
What moves the work into the stratosphere, is that it can be read in different ways, going down and/or across, read and rereading in
parts, as if building up into a climax of chanting at the end of the work. Reading quickly through the last poems, the “0”, the “od,”
the “g od,” the voice reads and rereads in different ways as if intoning a Black Mass, in some rhythmic art presentation of
ritualistic violence. Perhaps with influences of the DaDa movement from W.W.I, the artists so moved by the insanity of the war
rejected reason and the Modernist school to focus on irrationality and the nonsensical.
A fantastique experimental event as the Think Machine meets The New Age in crash, [RE] COLLECTION OF THE [UN] LIKELY by Dani Ferrara
and Gabrielle Lessans.
Available @ Trainwreck Press.
