Festival

Broc Rossell is from California and lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he teaches poetry writing, literature, and interdisciplinary courses in culture and theory for the English and Humanities departments at Simon Fraser University. His work has appeared in 1913, Boston Review,Denver Quarterly, Fence, Harvard Review, jubilat, iO, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Laurel Review,Volt, and other places. \u27The glass of water / on the table is / what\u27s possible,\u27 observes Broc Rossell, \u27a little / flood / of elegance, / a recital.\u27 The same could be said of Festival itself. This is a book of defamiliarizations, a recital of phenomenological possibility aflood in its own formal elegance, like a glass of water made prismatic and strange. Threading through the Halloween parade of Aaron Cardella\u27s spectral artwork, the speaker of this collection leads us \u27From leaf to branch / From branch to figure / From figure to ground / From ground into darkness,\u27 where the catabasis of perception both ends and begins. Follow this guide and you\u27ll find yourself \u27in the center of the word Now, / in the center of the letter O,\u27 at the point-blank degree zero of poetry. —Srikanth Reddy A striking momentum drives this careful, meditative long poem in which the I strives to coincide with its body amid the rife overflow of the world. And it is that overflow, in all its vivid detail, that gives this work its deep wealth and visionary range. The attention to the world paid here, whether despairing, reminiscent, documentary, or jubilant, is always an act of applied love, a celebration of the passing present; every line rings with that commitment. —Cole Swensen I write in praise of Broc Rossell, who writes in his own praise: \u27scrap wire, aging automaton, / wastrel bumblefuck.\u27 A poet of praise with a tongue sharp enough to cut space. I take his celebration to be sincere, although his tone is subdued, even mournful at times, and the sweetness of the images is tempered by darkness, as in a fairy tale. Is he criticizing every wrong thing, as Dave Hickey once suggested, by \u27praising it in the wrong way\u27? Or have the right things never been duly celebrated before? —Aaron Kunin More Information: Poetry Northwest Inknode iO: Poetry InDigest H_NG M_Nhttps://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/clpc_bks/1161/thumbnail.jp