Jack Foley
Jack Foley: has published fifteen books of poetry, five books of criticism, and Visions & Affiliations: A California Literary Timeline (Pantograph Press, 2011), a “chronoencyclopedia” of California poetry from 1940 to 2005. His most recent books include WHEN SLEEP COMES: Shillelagh Songs (Sagging Meniscus press, 2020), RIVERRUN (Poetry Hotel Press, 2017), and others. He became well known through his “multivoiced” performances with his late wife, Adelle, who was also a poet. His radio show, “Cover to Cover,” airs every Wednesday on KPFA in California. In 2010, He received the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Berkeley Poetry Festival. Michael McClure: “Jack Foley is our firebrand experimentalist and he holds his torch high so the reader can have more light.”
Bengt O Björklund
Bengt O Björklund: poet, artist, journalist, photographer, writer, musician, and editor was born in Stockholm in 1949. In 1968 he landed in jail in Istanbul for $20 worth of hash and met a bunch of international artists, poets, and musicians. It was then he embarked on his artistic voyage. In 2018, he was awarded Sweden Beat Poet Laureate by the National Beat Poetry Foundation Inc. His artistic journey started in Istanbul with colored pencils and watercolours. He has five collections of poetry in English and six in Swedish.
CAConrad
CAConrad: has worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. They are the author of 9 books, including AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration (Wave Books, 2021), which won the 2022 PEN Josephine Miles Award. They received a 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, and a Lambda Award. They exhibit poems as art objects with recent solo shows in Spain and Portugal, and their play The Obituary Show was made into a film in 2022 by Augusto Cascales. A new collection of poetry is forthcoming from Wave Books in 2024 titled Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return. Visit them online at https://linktr.ee/CAConrad88
Imagine
Imagine by Tom Fallon.
Transition Books and Goose River Press, October 2023,
219 pages, paper, $13.99,
ISBN: 9781597132701
Tom Fallon’s latest book is probably not best described as a book at all, but as an experience, the human journey along the inscrutable timeline of existence itself. It is a work that measures itself in the spaces of blank pages — many throughout the book — which create the effect of the “reader” hearing /experiencing their own breathing between episodes of words.
The book is presented in four sections containing prose and free verse between the deep breaths. The four sections are Naked, Presence, Imagine, and Silence. In these parts we span the despair of chaos in the before–life; the reckoning of self, and the need for, and existence of, a creator; the pure, unclothed joy of living and life itself; and finally, the quiet mysteries beyond our boundaries where
there are no human beings
no earth
there are no galaxies
no creation
no time
there is nothing
_____________________
Imagine is best experienced by those who leave their gravity boots at the door, and just breath.
— Craig Sipe