My chapbook Greetings from Bowling Green is now available from The Magnificent Field!
Every day in April 2017, I composed a poem for a friend, typed it on a postcard fed into my Brother Compactronic 58 electric typewriter, and mailed it from Bowling Green, Ohio.
The chapbook includes most of those poems, slightly edited after I typed them up again on my laptop. Here's the postcard I sent to Gina Myers alongside her poem in the chapbook:
Photo by Gina Myers
And here's the chapbook in one of its natural environments, the NYC subway (I had just left New York after seven-plus years when I wrote the poems, and they seem to be set there as much as in Ohio):
Photo by Jenna Cardinale
Big thanks to Jen Tynes for choosing and laying out and printing and binding this chap. Name your price and order here!
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On âThe Moth Apocalypseâ, by Joseph Turrent (2020)
(Disclosure: I donât personally know Joseph Turrent. I do know Haverthorn/HVTN Press, which is run by Andrew Wells and Iris Colomb (Iâm familiar with Andrew). They both seem to have an interest in interdisciplinary practice, and they do some really interesting things with form and language, kind of messing with the dimensions of how we receive language on the page, how we receive language as performance. I think those values are synonymous in the work HVTN publishes. Itâs not about work that can be classified, rather the unclassified. Itâs been a really beautiful thing to watch Haverthorn grow. I was published in the first issue of Haverthorn Magazine, that mustâve been about 5 years ago, maybe longer (I was a completely different writer back then, I was 17). Back then it was just a tiny collective of poems and fictional pieces. Now theyâre a press, theyâve got multiple different platforms including Haverthorn Magazine, they also run Interruptions and Correspondences. Their identity is much more streamlined. Thematically I would say that the publications are varied, but I think theyâre all united by a common interest in intertextuality, or multidisciplinary influences. I think itâs rare to find publishers which are so openly into the âuncategorisedâ in the UK. I think the UK is still publishing a lot of writing which yanks itself into a genre, like the industry is still bound by a lot of traditional canonical stuff... I think it is changing a bit, but it is refreshing and comforting to know that Haverthorn have been thinking and publishing this sort of stuff for a while.)Â
This debut collection from Joseph Turrent is like a fever dream. The relentless doom of oncoming death in a cyclonic-tidal-wave-storm where God is a 58-year-old man and Elon Musk is singing baby shark. How do we continue to forge and define our self-identity when the end of everything is so near? When our inevitable mortality is met by storms we canât weather? How do we drive that message home without flying off the handle?Â
What Iâm most flummoxed by is this textâs use of layering, and the multiplicity of that âlayeringâ, textually, structurally... (something Iâll unpack in a while). It plays on ambiguity in words, it cracks open these weird, beautiful dualisms mirrored between reality and irreality, sort of echoing Charlotte Geaterâs poems for my fbi agent except the relationship here is not a coexistence between I and the agent. Rather this is a relationship with the world, felt all over the whole world. Itâs our binding relationship with the very public disintegration of our existence in a world which never fails to learn from its mistakes, from a species whose errors seem to forever *glitch*. Itâs a huge headache, but itâs also crystal clear in its admonition to us, and yet it articulates the worldâs end in a beautiful, complicated, mesmerising way (certain lines make me think of Crispin Best). And in its prescience, Joseph really underlines how much of this is already happening before it has happened, in analogies both profound and absurd.Â
So again, I thought because of some of the interesting pop-culture references and crossovers with poems for my fbi agent I decided to talk to my mother about the complexities that this collection poses, and jostle with its meaning. I think we both felt really weird reading this swirl of a text (itâs literally swirling down the page), I likened it to feeling âcar sickâ at times, so Iâm gonna start with the way the poetry is structured because I think itâs the first layer to this collection, which you need to pick at before you can bridge all this amazing, convoluted imagery.Â
For the sake of keeping the poetryâs structure intact, Iâm going to screenshot sections from the review copy HVTN generously sent me. This way Iâm not spending ten years typing it out carefully (which I usually do cos Iâm normally quoting from ze printed matter), and I want people to see how Joseph works with form and shape. Itâs not obvious from the first poem in the collection, âMothsâ, what the structure is because itâs a short opening piece, but begins to imply some sort of outline, or perhaps a disintegration, where line breaks leave words hanging. I begun thinking about what moths are in this scene, their presence, when do they come awake? Part of the collectionâs thematics takes it focus from âdarknessâ, literal and figurative, the darkness of day, the âgrimdarknessâ (as Joseph puts it in âone rain drop falls out the skyâ) of a summer in February and these gruesome, seasonal abnormalities which are set to interrogate us and make us feel uncomfortable. (Letâs face it, itâs uncomfortable when thereâs daffodils in January). Beginning with âEnding Sceneâ:
All the way through, Josephâs poems zigzag and swirl down the page like this ^. I enjoy Josephâs, Iâm assuming intentional irony here, in beginning the collection at the end. Heâs intimating the symmetry of our present-day predicament: living in the beginning of our worldâs end. That first line propels us to our future:Â âitâs 2030, the wind is so strong itâs a geometrical patternâ. Now take a look at this extract again, look at it as a whole image. Joseph is playing out that image of a geometrical pattern through line breaks and alignment. Itâs so deliberate, so exact. It feels engineered. And itâs this powerful wind, winding its way down and down the pages, which embodies a resemblance to a natural form, like the way you think of clouds travelling across a digitised map of the world on a weather channel. Half of this collection situates itself amongst ramifications of climate change, the erratic change in weather, the skyâs putrid colour, threatening and sick. Weâre seeing a storm unwind in words. But when you take a look at the other references Joseph wields in his writing, you can begin to see that this visual structure intimates more subtle connotations.Â
Remember how I said that the collection is exploring the errors of our species which forever seem to glitch on themselves? We keep repeating the same history which evidences our end? I think this is implied by the way the text swirls, and eats on itself. Joseph says at one point, âthis glitch is hilariousâ (one rain drop falls out of the sky), opening us up to this denial, like âthe apocalypse is happening, this is surrealâ laughter, but itâs also kind of like, weâre losing our minds, weâre laughing because weâre bridging the insanity of everything dissolving before us, endlessly replaying itself, over and over. Iâm kind of reminded by that scene in âThe Midnight Gospelâ from Episode 6, âVulture With Honourâ, when Clancy and Captain Bryce (the guy that comes to fix Clancyâs simulator), tells him his list of rules when navigating these dangerous different coloured wobbles to get to Sparkle (a cow-like creature who makes green oil which is used to preserve and keep the lantern part of a simulator healthy I guess, hard to explain if youâve not watched the series). Anyway so they come across this little weird man creature with a hoopla head holding onto a rocket or bomb-like thing, stuck inside purple wobble, which Captain Bryce explains: thatâs the kind of wobble that locks you in time. And this little man stuck inside the purple wobble is glitching like:
And then Captain Bryce says: âitâs too late for this guy, his mind is pickledâ because heâs been stuck in the same second forever. And I got to thinking about how, the more acutely aware we become as a species of how weâre repeating the same mistakes, facing the same consequences, extinguishing the same forest fires, over and over, the more riddled the mind becomes, and anguished I guess. So the poetry here isnât just like a cyclonic pattern depicting a natural form; the strange, violent weather tearing up the planetâs astro turf and rainforests. Itâs also a visual representation of historyâs rhythm. This glitch, this error that remains eternally stuck, jolting on itself. It really gives weight to the series of images in this writing, which repeatedly hit you in the face, but it also compounds the repetition in the writing. In âthis is the sadnessâ, (and pretty much all of the poems), Joseph keeps coming back to lines like âI canât stop thinking aboutâ and âIâm writing aâ pegged by a series of repetitive motifs, butterflies, 58 year old men as God, airplanes, butterflies, horror show, airplanes, horrow movieâ... That repetition is attached to this glitch-affected way of writing. Itâs clever and unusual, and when I started reading the structure as a message in its own right, I was amazed by how things suddenly started to make sense in terms of the writing. I could see all this incredible dualism which Joseph plays with and writes about.Â
So I went back and refreshed the first poem in this collection, âMothsâ.Â
Iâm thinking of terms like âcloudzâ, and what clouds are, how they move, what they mean in this day and age. The obvious dualism here is the physical clouds we see and study in the sky, their changeability as they move across throughout the day, carrying rain or snow, whatever. And then thereâs this more enigmatic weird concept of âThe Cloudâ in computing, which is a homonym in and of itself. You have Skyâs WiFi âThe Cloudâ, where anyone can make an account and sign into their WiFi and they have hotspots called âThe Cloudâ all over the UK. Youâve got âcloud computingâ which is this method of data storage, normally created by a single provider. They manage the data and how itâs processed/stored/encrypted and users can upload or save information there. Anyone with an Apple product automatically gets an âiCloudâ account where their data is automatically backed by Appleâs cloud software. This means you never have to sync up your devices with wires or buy extra USB sticks/external hard drives to back up your data. You can just set a timer on your phone, link it to your iCloud account and itâll automatically back up whenever you want. People think of this accumulation of data in one place, (without having to personally manage it) as being an âamorphous cloudâ. Iâm seeing this as a poem which introduces this element of denial about our surroundings. Weâre pretending its normal and trying to squish out the reminder of these seasonal abnormalities. Even if itâs stripped across the sky, âblack with insane swirls you could drown inâ (alluding to the writing on the page itself), our denial tells us to talk us away from the indefinite scream that itâs not okay. âOur cloudz are dying because of uââthe way Joseph intersperses Internet vernacular/text-speech/shorthand here introduces the Internetâs presence, and our tensions between our physical reality and our artificial one. We transcribe events into our phones. We see something, we talk about it in on an online platform. The way we transfer reality from a physical realm to a virtual realm is an exchange which happens so regularly and with such rigour that itâs an indented feature to 21st century society. Every time Boris Johnson makes an announcement in real-time, journalists flock to Twitter to unpack it in an online arena which stays up for the rest of time. The fact that language is swamped by Internet culture and adopts terms once pertaining to more physical objects or tangible sensations sensations, renders language more faceted and multiplicitous than ever before. Such ambiguousness in what we mean and how we mean it, contributes to this acute confusion and fear, which compounds contemporary culture.Â
Other homonyms:Â
Iâm thinking of dark as in âdark modeâ and âdarkâ as in âdisturbingâ. âI regret not running through Wheatâ I think is a reference to that Theresa May interview where she said the naughtiest thing she ever did was run through fields of wheat with her friends, (as opposed to increased austerity and fucking up Brexit + various other shit).Â
âaccidentally deleting the human raceâ makes a mockery of the way the world is ending, which is by no means, âan accidentâ. I also wonder about the dualism in âA tornado touched my heart & Iâm cryingâ, is it that weâre seeing the destruction a tornado unleashes as a perturbance? Sometimes Joseph writes like the way emojis sound, does anyone get that? Sort of like a staccato, plain-text way of articulating emotion. Did an emoji tornado touch his emoji heart?Â
Such an incredible line: âI love / thunderstorms because it sounds like God is choking on grapefruitâ. Iâm not even going to unpack that. Iâm going to leave that one to simmer.
But thatâs not an example of an homonym here, in this section I was looking more at the part about âa million weird dead bugsâ. Thereâs the bugs that come to eat us as we decompose. And then thereâs âcomputer bugsâ. Just a few examples where Josephâs playing on words here.Â
I think of these homonyms as alluding to our inability to discern between reality and virtuality. Weâre unable to understand our reality as it is now, I mean if you discard the Internet and technology, we already struggle with deciphering between our own perception to anotherâs perception. What one perceives as being red, another might call pink, or orange, or green. The additional threat that Internet culture imposes is that, our language eventually becomes swamped by the technological vernacular of computers, of online-existence. And yet itâs inevitable, and itâs already happening. Itâs interestingâElon Musk said in 2016 about whether he thought humans were living inside a computer simulationâ âThe strongest argument for us probably being in a simulation I think is the following: 40 years ago we have Pong [the Ping Pong video game]âtwo rectangles and a dot. Thatâs where we were. Now 40 years later we have photorealistic, 3D simulations with millions of playing simulatenously and itâs getting better every year. And soon weâll have virtual reality, weâll have augmented reality. If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, just indistinguishable.âWhat Josephâs showing here is the multiplicity and changeability of language, how technology burrows into its sinews, transforming terms we use to describe our tangible, physical realities into ones which you can hold in your hand and scroll down with your thumb. Language is the currency of culture which is being endowed to technology. But thatâs not abnormal of language per se, I mean itâs symptomatic of how language and meaning evolve simultaneously, languageâs multiplicity. Rather what Joseph is saying that itâs bridging a confusing gap, how can you tell between the tears streaming down your face and the ones streaming from your television? His poetry seems to breed flesh and wire together, forge them as inextricably bound entities of today. We canât distinguish ourselves from our flesh to our wired online flesh.Â
But although set it in the future, you can tell that this collection is entirely rooted in the now, even when it oscillates between different years in the near and distant future, from 2030, to 3042, to 2076. It reads like a series of tweets, but it appears like scan-lines coursing down the page, so Josephâs really capturing a generational voice here, that âonlineâ voice which is stripped and clipped, where it feels squeezed into 100-odd characters. The poetry is peppered with well-known, familiar references pertaining to our present-day. And I think year dates are an artifice in this collection. The worldâs end is so resolutely close to us that we can taste it in images like Elon Musk singing baby shark, Lana del Rey as the saddest superhero, David Hasselhoff eating the white wine emoji... Itâs laughable. Itâs funny. Itâs hard. I think part of the way I read into this mesh of pop-cultural references was down to its implied superficialism. Yâknow, we sort of think of our extinction as being a distant probability, but we canât think about it without losing our minds. We barely accept the inevitable truth of our own mortality, we just canât come to terms with the reality that someday we will sip our last cup of coffee, hug a friend for the last time. And we wonât necessarily know itâs the last time, until itâs the last time. This fear is particularly prevalent in Western culture, so weâve barricaded ourselves with our egos, and constructed this site which vows to distract us from that not-so-terrifying revelation, that weâre all going to die. Death is natural. But we think itâs so unnatural and upsetting, that weâve invented celebrity culture, make-up tutorials, 100K followers, emoji reactions, opinion polls, status updates, likes, Facebook algorithms, botox and red shoes as part of a sequence to distract us from the eventuality of death, thinking that these things will sustain us. Itâs all artificial, itâs all blue-light, itâs all moths ever gravitate towards. Joseph humours it, (I wonder if heâs jaded at times) with a sigh:Â
âThereâs all sort of thunder & / lighting and it is Fantastic and important tv.â Me and my mother both laughed when we read this, itâs more mockery of the kind of vapidity in contemporary culture. Just endlessly being like: âoh watch this, oh Iâll link you the video, this is so funny watch it, look at this, this is my fav clipâ, itâs nauseating. And you get this nauseating feeling when youâre reading this collection as it continues, it begins to make less sense, it begins to glitch and unravel to the point where you donât really understand whatâs going on. Itâs bombardment, and the struggle in making sense of whatâs going on typifies the way the âIâ is struggling to hold onto sanity. And while the dystopia of The Moth Apocalypse makes for a terrifying read, itâs also met with such beauty, I donât think Iâve ever read a more beautifying approach to apocalyptic writing. You can take deep pleasure in the way Joseph articulates natural disaster. From âone rain drop falls out of the skyâ: âI went to see the cherry blossoms in the glowing forest / [...] / THE SKY IS PURPLE LET ME SLEEP / [...] it smells like strawberry / pop tarts outsideâ. This âglowing forestâ alludes to a forest fire, the purple sky alludes to light pollution, making it hard to sleep. Strawberry pop tarts goes without saying really, probably one of the best examples of describing consumerist culture in a nutshell: pre-cooked, chugging in artificial colours and flavours. But when you read these sentences alone, you donât get the impression that the world is dying awash in blood and fire, rather the violence is extinguished. It reads and feels more like a painting, this gradual description of shades and experiences. Thereâs something kind of Eva Figes-esque about his writing style, just the way he colours in scenes. I wouldnât go so far as to say itâs glamorised, but rather, the apocalypse is beautified.Â
I want to bring this review full circle and come back to the collectionâs title: The Moth Apocalypse. By the end, I came to think of humanity, us as being the moths, here, roused by darkness and addicted to rectangular devices emanating blue-light. We frantically flap around its notification, its constant stream of information as the world around us is plunged into dark mode. The points where youâre thinking that the collection is relenting and giving up, are actually the most profound moments where it gets up. Joseph writes it best in âEverything Is Peachyâ: âif youâre / looking for a sad and hopeful story / just sit / back and watch this rain.â This collection begs us to be present, to consider and amend, and if nothing else, to laugh wildly as you donât remedy it. It is an incredibly self-aware read, an invaluable perception of the âway things are headingâ. The composition and structure of the poetry is masterful, art in its own right. The Moth Apocalypse is a promising and brave debut from Joseph Turrent. Â
If this reviewâs piqued your interest, you can purchase The Moth Apocalypse from HVTN Press here but they have stopped postal orders for a while due to Covid-19, so you may have to hold on. In the mean time you can find more of Joseph here on Twitter.Â
Full disclosure: you are seeing this because we are asking for money. There, now thatâs out of the way. In 2017 Get Fresh Books published three wonderful poetry collections, and in 2018, two more. And a multiplicity of voices is on the way!! We appeal not only to your bank account, but also to your desire to read and get to know Americaâs many voices. In the words of Walt Whitman âI hear America singing, the varied carols I hear.â I am excited about the books weâre publishing in 2019. Join our family of supporters and contributors. Join us on this journey. There are three ways to contribute: One: Visit our Patreon site, become a Patron, and support us on a regular basis: https://www.patreon.com/getfreshbooksllc Two: Visit our GoFundMe page and donate as many times as you like without a monthly commitment. https://www.gofundme.com/support-get-fresh-books-llc Three: Visit our website and purchase our books and / or tee shirts. https://www.getfreshbooksllc.com/ Thank you for your love and support. #donate #supportmeonpatreon #smallpresses #poetrypublishing #getfreshbooksllc https://www.instagram.com/p/BpwursFHU1Y/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1pp92uyhh2kxy
Second year at @nyu_ipk Print Fest event! I was just on a panel about alternative economies with poetry and books with @mc.hyland @peripatetistasis @phosphorescentfacehighlighter and #felipebecerra! Currently there is a bookmaking workshop with @amberatiya! #NYU #Ipk #books #authors #smallpresses #publishers #writers
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He always arrived by bike, and he sat in one particular seat that I came to know as âthat guyâs spot.â He carried peculiar tools and odd accruements of the literary sort. Some days, Iâd watch him as he spooled thread between his teeth before looping it through a needle.Â
Then, he would stitch pages together.Â
One day, I finally asked âthat guyâ to explain his high strangeness, to appease my interest in his erudite manner: He told me his name was Andrew Saulters, and that he was making books.Â
Not just any books, he pointed out. Andrew is an apprentice at Unicorn Press, a small, primarily poetry press located in Greensboroâs Glenwood Books. Unicorn Press, established in 1966 by Al Brilliant and his late wife, Teo Savory, isnât just a small press publishing hand bound collections of poetry. The press is a force -- a legend -- something spectacular in Americaâs literary history.Â
I didnât explore Unicorn Press until the release of Terry Kennedyâs collection, New River Breakdown, which renewed my personal interest in poetry. Kennedyâs collection is soulful and divine. In an ode to his graceful prose, Andrew solicited local artists to design unique covers for the collection, thus honoring Unicornâs bequest of fostering creative community.Â
Glenwood Books:Â
Andrew suggested that I speak to Al Brilliant if I desired to learn more about Unicorn Press. I admit that I was intrigued and intimidated by the idea. Al is a legacy. I am not a very good poet.Â
I entered Glenwood Books on a cold, midwinter day not knowing what to expect.Â
There are moments one intuitively understands when a cultural endowment appears in sight. I shook inside as Al highlighted his lifeâs work. My soul recognized that I was in the company of something special.Â
 I shook inside, I tell you.
 As Al shared personal stories intimately tied with Unicornâs history, I learned about one of Thich Nhat Hanhâs early visits to the United States, courtesy of Unicorn. (The press published four of Nhat Hanhâs poetry collections, plus a novel in their journal). Cry of Vietnam was published with support from a National Endowment for the Arts grant. Unicorn was a early recipient of the program.Â
Al also shared about Philip Levineâs work. The press published 5 Detroits, which included the poem, âThey Feed They Lion.â That poem would one day bring Andrew into Alâs world. Click the audio above to hear that story.Â
I heard Alâs stories about Philip Levine just weeks before Levine passed away (Feb 14, 2015). I learned that Al met Phil in Santa Barbara during Thich Nhat Hanhâs poetry reading. With the Vietnam war raging, and with many of the white, middle class audience having never encountered a real Vietnamese, much less one who was a monk donned in an orange robe and with a shaved head, Phil turned to Al and said, âHow can we kill people with such beautiful language?â How could we so easily dehumanize a civilization that produced such poetry from someone like Nhat Hanh?Â
Phil served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2010-2011.Â
Unicorn Press was instrumental in raising generations of poets who would grow up to become literary giants. The press engaged writers who mirrored its mission of spiritual, political, and civic engagement.
Producing this podcast challenged me in several ways. Every story Al shared shimmered with so much historical anecdotes that I lamented having to put any of it aside. Alâs marriage to Teo is an episode into itself. He was 19 years old when he met her; she was much older, not Jewish, five times divorced. They established Unicorn Press together, and the press is a testament to their relationship as well as their commitment to carving out powerful literary space in American society.
Al -- a former resident of Gotham Books, a writer, a book maker -- turns the press over to Mr. Andrew Saulters in January of 2016. The fellow on the bike takes flight. The legacy will continue.
Soundtrack:Â Because Al and Andrew sew books, I honored that endeavor by composing original music for this podcast.