De Villo Sloan reviews Angela Caporaso's Wars (2024) at Asemic Front 2

Visual poet De Villo Sloan was good enough to provide the first review for Angela Caporaso's Wars (2024) over at Asemic Front 2. Thanks so much! You can read the original post here (with a bunch of accompanying visuals, also).

Visual artist Angela Caporaso (Caserta, Italy) has been exploring visual poetry. rob mclennan’s above/ground press in Ottawa, Canada, has given us a chapbook of this recent work.

I am set at ease when exploring Wars by the no-frills approach of above/ground press that highlights the work and makes a soft allusion to the gritty, underground visual poetry that took shape in the formerly industrial Great Lakes cities of the USA and Canada.

Caporaso’s emphasis on language materiality, dimensionality and cut-up makes her text an ideal match for mclennan’s editorial eye.  

In Wars, Caporaso tells us the visual poems in the edition are inspired by "some short poems by Wystan Hugh Auden." Contemporary visual poets seem to enjoy anchoring their new work to older literary tradition.

The repetition of cut-up/concrete forms, shifting in constructs of opposing dark and light, suggests to me various configurations of battling armies, military maps. I find myself considering the phenomenon of binary opposition in nature and the human compulsion to warfare. Wars can be read as a visual-linguistic anti-war sequence. The book has much more to offer as well.

Recently John Richard McConnochie, the Australian visual poet and asemic writer, well-known for his diligent admin work at the great Facebook Post-literate group, has been using the term "neo-glyphic" to identify certain asemic forms that he is observing. This brings me to explain why I chose to place my review of Angela's book on Asemic Front2.

Aspects of asemic writing are merging with the new concrete (or neo-concrete). In Angela Caporaso's War is a series of evolving neo-glyphs that move from binary oppositional structures to pieces that are far more non-binary.

Congratulation to Angela Caporaso and to rob mclennan for his keen editorial eye recognizing this great book.