About the Book
This debut volume establishes Steve Willard as a true original, an artist whose kinetic sense of wordplay is deft, smart, and unfailingly provocative. Intended to be read in repeated passes, these poems are Cubist in feel, multifaceted in syntax, and brilliant in coloration. By turns disjunctive, narrative, plaintive, and disruptive, Harm. makes use of a wide formal range in reaching toward its ambition, which is nothing short of reclaiming lost human potentiality from current norms. Syntax flexes and the world is refigured, observed as if through a different camera's open aperture, drawing the reader to a new and transformative interior landscape.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
I
what little fountains we are
(Only Life . . .)
Craftiquel Row (Side-Song)
Permission To Die
With Slight Matter (Currents)
II
How To Read “Harm” (This Book)
Continental Blue
And Being Imaginable
Deliciae, Solaciolum
——less
—tie air across my face, featureless understanding
Shingle Mirror, Average Bark
Shadows (Numbers) Tell It (To The Executioner)
Board Of Rites
Dial “O”
Curved Glide Of Glazed Ambiguity
Heart Like A Drum
Immediately Thinking
III
Old Hours
Bear And Policeman II “Fairest, Lord Jesus”
The Iliad And The Odyssey
Dark Drop Hook
Process Arquero
Candied Mai’nhood
IV
Endures
Carmellathons
But They Know
Why To Talk, What To Say
Stranded Voice/Deliciae
Parking Timbre
Cutting White Boxes
Butterfly Steak
V
(Crinkled)
Not Ever = Not Now
Ideas (Denuded)
The Calm Repairs
(Invendavel)
To Skystars, To Churchmouse
Is There Anything Nugget Can Do?
Ed Palestrina
Where They’ll Bury Me
Seven Pebbles
——less
(Ipsa Possem: Fragment
Acknowledgments
