Reviewed by Charles Borkhuis
Self Geofferential
poems and illustrations
by Geoffrey Gatza
BlazeVOX
February 2025, ISBN: 978–1–609644–82–6, 118 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1609644826
Studded with a collection of radiant work and collages, poet and illustrator Geoffrey Gatza has given us a stunning new e-book of good poems for the thoughts’s eye to feast upon. And what a feast it’s! We transfer by a menu of beautiful delights that each whet the urge for food and stimulate the creativeness. A better take a look at his visible artwork reveals that the sky and floor are sometimes introduced as shards of coloured glass reflecting photographs of this world, or as Gatza says “I’m telling you a narrative a few sunny day however in the meanwhile it’s raining glass.”
Among the many many hats he wears, Gatza is a famend chef and writer of BlazeVOX, a extremely regarded poetry press and influential e-mag. His newest e-book, Self Geofferential, is nothing lower than a scintillating bouquet of colours, tastes, and branching sensual encounters that may “… change the way in which you see / The uninteresting and alter / How you’re feeling about every little thing.” This e-book of roaming aromas and discrete pleasures desires the reader to really feel, scent, and style phrases in a brand new manner. In slowing time down, we attune to a different stage of notion “to a spark of inspiration / a shock so extraordinary / you too will discover the human coronary heart burning in every little thing.”
The edges of the e-book rapidly widen to tell us that “childhood is usually the largest little unhappiness.” It acknowledges many fathers’ embarrassment and remorse for being “… unable to talk to their sons / about something significant.” There’s a poem about little Purple Using Hood advised to a toddler by a loving grandmother who, within the baby’s thoughts, turns right into a wolf dressed up as her grandmother and concludes “simply perhaps, you’re a wolf too.” Gatza delights in displaying us many sides of ourselves hiding beneath the identical hat.
It’s attention-grabbing to notice that apart from being a poet, chef, and editor of the press BlazeVOX, Gatza can be an writer and illustrator of many youngsters’s books, the latest of which is entitled, The Albatross Across the Neck of Albert Ross, Unusual Tales for Wild Youngsters (Lavender Ink). Equally, lots of Gatza’s poems carry the sense of childhood adventures and magical mysteries that lie in look forward to younger and previous alike. Even of their unhappy and somber moments, his poems and illustrations glow with marvel, knowledge, and a scrumptious sense of playfulness. Immediately an illustrated head could flip right into a Magritte-like apple or fingers twist into the branches of a tree. Typically, there are stunning components of magic realism peeking between the leaves of a forest as if we have now simply entered an enchanted Henri Rousseau portray.
In his masterly two-part poem, Henry Darger Desires of Emily Dickinson, Gatza reveals his vary by evoking the picture of automobiles whizzing previous a physique mendacity “face down within the highway.” He slowly develops this picture right into a penetrating meditation on life, demise, and rebirth that offers these conventional themes startling new life and urgency. The protean physique in query floats from roadside to bedside to dream, from residing to useless, to pretending to be useless whereas laughing within the trunk of a automotive. So too, the poem turns again on itself in elliptical, surprising methods. It regularly teases out new meanings by rephrasing strains like “Relive the recollections of beforetime and discover nothing as the reply / to every little thing,” which two stanzas later develop into “… to let go / recollections of beforetime and find every little thing as the reply to nothing.” A number of meanings reverberate like intersecting ripples round pebbles tossed in a stream.
Gatza’s e-book is regularly cooking up new experiences, unique style treats, and sensual liaisons in celebration of residing life from prime to backside and again once more. In some way his America is at all times there entrance and middle, within the large metropolis wilderness, the desert expanse, or sleepy small cities leaning beneath the shade of timber. He has developed a eager eye and ear for utilizing the best phrase on the proper time in the best manner. And on this regard, he catches us bustling and tacky, vivid and lonely in a tune of unhappiness and delight. He provides us a grasp prepare dinner’s plate of earthy inuendoes and delicate surprises. One can’t assist feeling his generosity of spirit and his soulful mix of phrases and painterly photographs that inform this loving, rigorously wrought e-book.
In regards to the reviewers: Charles Borkhuis is a poet, playwright, and essayist born and raised in NYC. His ten earlier collections of poems embrace: Spontaneous Combustion [SurVision] winner of the James Tate Poetry Prize 2021, FINELY TUNED STATIC, poems with work by John McCluskey [Lunar Chandelier], DEAD RINGER [BlazeVOX], DISAPPEARING ACTS [Chax], AFTERIMAGE [Chax], and Alpha Ruins [Bucknell University], chosen by Fanny Howe as a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Guide Award. His poems have appeared in six anthologies and his essays on up to date poetics had been included in Telling it Slant and We Who Like to Be Astonished [University of Alabama]. His work has appeared in quite a few magazines and journals together with: Brooklyn Rail, Otoliths, Marsh Hawk, Posit, BlazeVOX, SurVision, American Letters and Commentary, Avec, Huge Bridge, First Depth, 5 Fingers, Jacket 2, New American Writing, o.blek, Talisman, Verse, and The World. He curated poetry readings for the Segue Basis in NYC for 15 years. He translated New Workout routines by Franck André Jamme [Wave]. His performs have been produced in NYC, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Hartford, San Diego, and Paris and have been revealed in 4 collections together with Mouth of Shadows [Spuyten Duyvil], and Current Tense [Stage This 3]. His two radio performs The Sound of Worry Clapping and International Our bodies had been produced for NPR [www.pennsound]. He’s the recipient of a Dramalogue Award and the previous editor of Theater: Ex, an experimental theater journal. He just lately moved from NYC and is presently residing in San Diego. He has taught at Touro Faculty and Hofstra College.
