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Mark Rothko’s paintings have the aura of the sacred, the immanence of a revelation, the promise of a secret that is always just about to be disclosed. Martin Rock responds to Rothko’s hushed eloquence with his own quick-hitting intimations of mortality, spiritual poems that deftly enter Rothko’s visionary space, his intimate, anguished, violent, and fateful dramas.Edward Hirsch

DEAR MARK is an unabashed open letter to Rothko’s paintings that pushes past what the rest of us have thought of them. Martin Rock inhabits these paintings and the imagination in exciting and lyrical poems all springing from color and abstraction but ending in the strange and beautiful. Rock reminds us that art goes both ways, and it takes a talented viewer to see what’s there.Matthew Rohrer

There’s such calm beauty in Martin Rock’s poems. The delicate pace allows us to look, listen, be present. But he’ll lead you into this blissful state, look you straight in the eyes, and tell you “The butterfly’s body is also a urinal cake / with antennae & legs braided into a rope.” He’s a philosopher and soothsayer with a strange sense of humor. “Life is a kind of rust” in his poems. So he looks to the future life, and the past life. Indeed, the poems here are concerned with life—from the primordial soup, to “on the body of a spider / death’s head.” It’s a stunning collection. One I look to for guidance in existence.Bianca Stone

Interview, American Literary Review with Karl Zuehike

“Martin Rock opens a dialogue with the work of visual artist Mark Rothko, with engaging results.”
–TheThePoetry

“The poems in Dear Mark are careful, beautiful, musical, deft, skilled, and sometimes puzzling, which in poetry is a good thing.”
–The Smoking Carillion

Martin Rock is a poet, editor, and teacher living in Brooklyn. He lived in Japan for nearly four years, where he taught elementary and junior high school and studied Japanese. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review; Conduit; DIAGRAM; Forklift, Ohio; H_NGM_N; Third Coast; The Journal, and was included in Best New Poets 2012 and featured recently on the websites Brooklyn Poets and The Bakery. With Philip D. Ischy, he wrote the chapbook Fish, You Bird (Pilot 2010). He has served as Editor in Chief of Washington Square, as Managing Editor of Epiphany, and is currently Editor in Chief of Loaded Bicycle. The recipient of fellowships from New York University, Port Townsend Writers Conference, and University of Houston, he will soon move to Texas to begin a doctoral candidacy in literature and creative writing.

No. 7, Black Form, 1964 on Verse Daily

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Harel writes with such grace, lacing his preoccupations with such a light touch of humor, that you often forget The Body Double is cut from the same big questions that keep us all up at night. If you’ve strayed from poetry, this is the book that will bring you back. If you’ve ever secretly wished that Kafka had been an optimist, this is the poet for you.
Téa Obreht

With mischievous appreciation for the human dilemma, The Body Double charts the adventures of a rebellious, canny self within the self, and in doing so offers an imaginative perspective on both the classic doppelgänger and the contemporary fascination with identity. These charming ontological poems suggest our myopia and powerlessness in the face of our own fears and delusions. They offer a wild exploration of proximity: estranged identities we wish we could suppress, the neighboring self we pity or blame. The wily id morphs into a sweeter version of the evil twin—a double-tasking double-dealer who gradually subsumes the hapless narrator. By means of such subtle doubling, Jared Harel entertains and surprises as he encounters—and enlivens—one of the great literary motifs.Alice Fulton

The Body Double is an impressive achievement of imagination and wordplay. With this, his first collection, Harel enters the American literary scene already accomplished. An estimable debut.
BJ Ward

When we look closely at “I,” we always seem to see a stranger, and so the doppelgänger is a perennial figure of dream. The shadow self follows us, looks back sometimes from the face of a person across from us at the intersection, and sometimes seems to speak out of our mouths before we know what’s happening. Harel’s witty and inventive poem employs a wide register of forms—from the sonnet to the legal contract—to investigate the inexhaustible power of Rimbaud’s dictum: Je est un autre.Mark Doty

Review from JMWW.

Interview with Stated Magazine.

Jared Harél is the author of Go Because I Love You (Diode Editions, 2018) and The Body Double (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2012). He’s been awarded the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from American Poetry Review, as well as the William Matthews Poetry Prize from Asheville Poetry Review. His poems have also appeared in such journals as 32 Poems, Poetry Daily, Massachusetts Review, The Southern Review, Tin House, and Threepenny Review. Harél plays drums, teaches writing at Nassau Community College, and lives in Queens, NY with his wife and two kids. For more info stop by: jaredharel.com 

§

I forgot who
you were, your name
and face,

your place
in my mind
was suddenly

amiss. Forgive me,
I whispered.
This is my pad.

You must be
my sibling. Here
is a mango.

I reached for you
and felt
only wind.

The sky, I uttered,
is terribly blue.
That poodle

you are petting
was implausibly
born.

You said
nothing. The narrative
forbid it.

I showed you
my penis. I pointed
out trees.

§

Since true emotions are inarticulate
and a tear is sincere only
by definition, I shut down
to find out the story, get the facts

by factoring out. My girlfriend
hates this: one-word answers,
the incessant silence, my double
all snowy like a broken TV.

She wonders what he’s thinking,
what I think of her outfit.
She turns to the mirror when he fails
to respond. Then one night

after screwing, she screams
I’m leaving! and straightens herself,
searching for her bra. By the time
she’s down the block, I see

she means it. He sees she means it
but can’t see what she means.

§

My body double tells me
I’m away on business
and won’t be back
for quite some time.

Meanwhile, he’s agreed
to read my mail,
pick up the newspaper,
just to be safe.

He insists it’s no trouble
walking my dog,
dating my girlfriend,
raking the leaves

around my refinished deck.
If I need to call,
I should try
my own number,

unless it is Sunday,
in which case,
my mother’s.

$8

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This is very unusual collection of poems, a formidable departure from the nation’s workshops. The rhythms and cadences of these Alter(n)ations imitate and celebrate the life forms that inhabit our lives. I take Matt Shears’ work seriously and with respect.Alex Kuo, author of The Man Who Dammed the Yangtze

Matt Shears invents new worlds in 10,000 Wallpapers. This long lyric is full of brute terror and bucolic beauty, exploring individual consciousness unmoored by our present “thundering interconnectivity”; 10,000 Wallpapers chronicles “the everyman meandering through this digitized countryside,” questioning how we can truly inhabit the world when reality has become denatured by the image. The speaker in this poem sings like Prufrock, in a lyric that is searing and true, as he searches for the possibilities of pure utterance and perception amidst what is manufactured.Cathy Park Hong, author of Engine Empire

Amidst a rural landscape bombarded with technology and the aftermath of history (both real and imagined), Shears creates poems of wonder and wandering, poems of longing and regret. Tidbits of mythology collide with folksongs and lullabies to create a fantastic place where “the Poem arises beauteous” yet “false projects glitter in the wind.” In these poems, bits and pieces of broken things do not add up to or equal their whole. Shears’ range of voice and unpredictable grace provide an exquisite backbone to the time/place/space that encompasses this vibrant collection.Megan Johnson, author of The Waiting

Review from Zoland Poetry
Review from decomP

mchtnchts : The Spoiled West and its Freshly Minted Infants :: Already Dead (2014) – Analog electronic music used from text of 10,000 Wallpapers by Kyle Bruckman & Lance Grabmiller.

Matt Shears is the author of Where a road had been (BlazeVOX, 2010). He lives in Oakland, California with his family. More work can be found on his website: tidingsofmagpies.wordpress.com

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Joe Fletcher’s world is so rich in language and dense in experience, I wonder where it all comes from. He seems to have lived a thousand lives, each deep in feeling and insight. These are authentic adventures no matter where they take place, and each one brings us closer to the truth. What joy they bring to the reader who loves words and is willing to let go for the ride.James Tate

Powerful, fully-realized complications, by which I mean accurate demonstrations of the twists and turns a human mind can take, of the serious dark deep dangerous and beautiful kind, that’s what Already It Is Dusk is. When Joe Fletcher asks, ‘What helps?’, it’s not a rhetorical question. In his poems he never stops searching for what might help us. Consolation, contradiction, awe, punishment, banishment, abandon, love, ache, hope, and fate intertwine and expose our humanity. This poetry is never slight, often nearly fatal. And it sounds so good.Dara Wier

The poems in Joe Fletcher’s Already It Is Dusk have a dark and old-world feel to them that I love. It is a time when men carry ropes of jerky; a time when cows ride on ships and the children’s heads are dented by doctors’ tongs. ‘Don’t go too near yourself,’ we are warned. ‘You are not who you say you are.’ This is the voice of our guide. And he has his gloved hand on your shoulder.Michael Earl Craig

Joe Fletcher is the author of the chapbook, Sleigh Ride, published by Factory Hollow Press. Other work of his can be found at jubilat, Octopus, Slope, Hoboeye, Poetry International, Hollins Critic, MoonLit, and elsewhere. He lives in Carrboro, NC. Visit him at his website: www.joefletcherpoetry.com.

PDF of 5 poems by Joe Fletcher.

Pork & Poetry – Joe Fletcher, Bianca Stone & Ana Božičević from Mount Tremper Arts on Vimeo.