vanishing

Bruce Holsapple

 

Vanishing Act



6 x 9 inches


144 pages


ISBN: 978-1-888809-59-6


$10.00

 

By turns mischievous and passionate, by fits lyrical and foolish, the poems of Vanishing Act map a sustained interrogation of the interior, taking as territory the lyric subject itself. The content derives from daily life, financial worries, washing the dishes, advancing age, but as poems proceed to impasse and insight, shifts in tone, focus, and rhythm transport those concerns. Considered as a whole, Vanishing Act involves the “depth we feel” and “shadow we cast,” the possibility of falling thru one’s self to “the view looking.” While poems play off death as the ultimate vanishing, they also work towards ways of perceiving, in which the preoccupied, twisted logic of interior monologue engages a sometimes higher dialogue.


“A poetry which inhabits, rather than announces, its themes; an account of what happens to a self as it becomes the materials it perceives; a poetry the register of that becoming; and a poetry determined by the tracks it has left behind, its melancholy tempered by a species of stoic wit. A series of variations and transformations, and a poetry supple enough to constantly undermine its own assertions and formal procedures: syntax disappearing and reappearing at will, lyric becoming colloquial, stanzas behaving like haiku, narrative becoming elegy. A poetry of reckoning and witness, a perceiving of perception: attention has rarely attended to its own strategies with such deliberation, and rarely have the objects of the world been the subject of such intensive and meticulous scrutiny.”
Marten Clibbens
author of Sonet; Sequence; and Veterans Day

Bruce Holsapple grew up in rural Maine in the 1950s, edited a small press in Portland, Maine in the 70s, then wandered off (Washington, Vermont, New York, Texas), working a proverbial variety of jobs, before finding his way into central New Mexico. Once there, possibilities of redemption stretched out like a bright desert landscape, sandy wash, lunar hills, cactus, juniper, & steep, stony mountains. He currently lives in Magdalena, NM, kindling a “wobbly little self” & scribbling, scribbling.