Greg Bem reviews Andrew Wessels' From Being Without Substance (2018)

Our pal Greg Bem was good enough to provide the first review for Andrew Wessels' From Being Without Substance (2018) at Goodreads. Thanks so much! You can see the original review here.

A daunting microcosmic brush with the holy, this book is ambiguous, confusing, and yet manages to be inventive and disturbingly refreshing. For those who know spirit and spirituality, and those who do not, the language within the poems of Wessels will startle and put you face to face with the higher and lower powers around all of us.

some author activity: Wessels, Barwin, Barton, Dennis, Rogal + mclennan,

Andrew Wessels has a new poem up in the Tuesday poem series at dusie; Gary Barwin has a new poem on the Chaudiere Books blog for #NationalPoetryMonth, as do John Barton and Michael Dennis; and both Stan Rogal and rob mclennan have work online in the new issue of QWERTY.

new from above/ground press: From Being Without Substance, by Andrew Wessels

From Being Without Substance
by Andrew Wessels
$5

The motif of a man
imprisoned in a tree:

might time rise stunned
in a region of hell. Lest mind
or “brother” deceive,

the creature—
traditionally the unbaptized
abode— was accustomed
to strange doubt.


    °


The north wind
expresses wandering.

Whether the double being
is used diversely,
which one (of two)
rewards frailty?

Spoil of battle derives from
hazard.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
April 2018
celebrating twenty-five years of above/ground press
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Andrew Wessels has lived in Houston, Cambridge, and Las Vegas. Currently, he splits his time between Istanbul and Los Angeles, where he is an editor at Les Figues Press. He has held fellowships from Poets & Writers and the Black Mountain Institute. His writing can be found in VOLT, Witness, Fence, Tammy Journal, Faultline, Los Angeles Review of Books, Jacket2, Literary Hub, and Colorado Review, among others. Semi Circle, a chapbook of his translations of the Turkish poet Nurduran Duman, was published by Goodmorning Menagerie in 2016. His first book, published by 1913 Press, is A Turkish Dictionary.

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9 or paypal at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com