Poetry of love and physics

Love, Stars, and Paradigms. Poems by Swarn Gill. Literary Revelations Press, 2023.

Reviewed by Gary Gautier

Swarn Gill’s book of poems has a bit of everything, from politics to interesting conceptual hooks (“the love of time not noticed”; “we are the moment time vibrates”; “your life / in a groove no wider than a dime”) to the one-lining bravado of Allen Ginsberg (“Melville’s Ahab’s got nothing on me”; “capitalism has its eye on you”). Mostly though, these are intimate poems of human feeling, best when they settle into pockets of suggestive imagery (“a galaxy of gold / through curved lenses / of glass and tissue”). Interestingly, the intimacy is sometimes carried in panoramic Whitmanesque sweeps (“static electricity felt everywhere … the trees, the towers / the peaceful church steeples / me standing tall in a field”; “my carbon is breathed in the trees … I glide through time with magnificent ease.” Or in the imagery of physics and astronomy (“the quartz of you / crystallizing before my eyes”; “I rotate on my axis”; “I marvel at Saturn’s rings”). The collection was a little uneven for me – some poems captivated me less than others, and I struggled at times with the rhyming poems – but I found it strong overall, with lots of poems and hooks and closures I will long remember. Definitely worth reading more than once.

prostrate me
among the daisies
let emerald butterflies
send me to slumber

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Alice featured on Freebooksy

ALICE is free today and featured on Freebooksy. Download while free. Read later. A download NOW, while the feature is hot, will help with bestseller list rankings, so get on Amazon and get your free instant download HERE! Tell your friends!

A post-apocalyptic adult hippie fairy tale by a two-time Faulkner-Wisdom Prize finalist.

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On literary fiction

Please link to the post/podcast page of Happiness Between Tails by da-AL to see my guest post on LITERARY FICTION 🙂

https://happinessbetweentails.com/2023/05/20/my-book-pueblos-magico-vid-g-gaultier-on-lit-fiction-pod/

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Alice Free

FREE download today. A post-apocalyptic adult hippie fairy tale by two-time Faulkner-Wisdom Prize finalist, Gary Gautier

Get it HERE while it’s free. Read it later.

#1 Bestseller on Amazon’s Metaphysical Fiction (free) list
#3 Bestseller on Amazon’s Literary Fiction (free) list

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Mexican artist Alfredo Langarica

Alfredo Langarica exhibition at Foro Cultural 81 (Guanajuato, Mexico, May 2023) https://www.facebook.com/FOROCULTURAL81/

Foro 81 always has good stuff, but the Langarica paintings were a fantastic surprise, even with that high bar. I found his paintings striking for the subjects (largely archetypal figures that blend and transcend the images of primeval Europe and Mesoamerica), the composition (those heavy archetypal figures are set in semi-abstract, palimpsest environments, pulling you in, pulling you back), and the style of the artist’s hand at work (creating a texture where the paintings seem almost sculpted from volcanic rock). I would hate to be placed in an exhibition with Langarica, as his works have a dominant presence in whatever room they are placed. Then again, brushing up against greatness, has its salutary effects, even if one is momentarily eclipsed. Ok, I will do a poetry reading in a gallery of Langarica’s works if he is willing … waiting …

                                     

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Featured on Freebooksy

Featured on Freebooksy today. Free one more day.  https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01MTGGWZV/

Go on. Do it. Release your inner hippie.

• An Age of Aquarius epic by a two-time Faulkner-Wisdom Prize finalist
• 4.1 stars in 133 Amazon ratings
• Featured in radio interviews on KSKQ Oregon and WRBH New Orleans

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Hippies free

Hippies is free this week. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01MTGGWZV/

Go on. Do it. Release your inner hippie.

• An Age of Aquarius epic by a two-time Faulkner-Wisdom Prize finalist
• 4.1 stars in 133 Amazon ratings
• Featured in radio interviews on KSKQ Oregon and WRBH New Orleans

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Two poems in Literary Revelations

Thanks to Gabriela Marie Milton for publishing two of my poems in Literary Revelations!

Hero and Leander (the lamp and the water)
At the Mirador in Noria Alta

https://literaryrevelations.com/2023/05/04/the-exceptional-poetry-of-gary-gautier/

Make sure to browse the books and journal at Literary Revelations, an independent publishing house with good people and a real commitment to the arts and literature community.

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The factory and the nerds

Here’s a new thread of my post-apocalyptic adult hippie fairy tale, Alice, which comes in after Alice and Christopher discovered the head in the bushes. This thread introduces the factory and the nerds.

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Two rows of circular desks, three tiers high each, teetered on both sides of a hardwood walkway. Each circular desk was ringed at the top with spools, purple, magenta, and apple red, which looked like flowerpots from the vantage of the entrance. The purpose of the spools was difficult to ascertain, as each desk housed a nerd absorbed in work on a laptop computer. This was the factory, and these were the nerds.

If one were to wander the hardwood path all the way to the end, one could turn left and enter the manufacturing wing of the factory, where the nerds gave way to the tattooed machinists, although what they were machining was hard to say. There was a sort of assembly line, in a Dr. Seuss kind of way, but it ended at an open window, and no one seemed much to care what went on outside of the window.

If there were a chief nerd or a chief machinist, they kept to themselves. Everything and everyone seemed quite egalitarian at the factory. From the egg and sprout sandwiches at the kitchen counter to the orange vests for the machinists, a carryover no doubt from an earlier era, in which orange vests were necessary, to the accessory booth for the nerds, it was share and share alike at the factory. Someone must have been in charge though. The nerds were ever upgrading the AI capabilities of the product and the machinists fine-tuning the hardware assemblies, but the endpoint remained an afterthought. When the work was done, the soft metal specks at the end simply flew out of the window. Ladybugs. Probably, someone, somewhere, had a larger purpose for the ladybugs. But that was no concern to the nerds and the machinists, who had pleasant enough work, their own colony of tiny houses, and ample trails for hiking. They were in but not of New Arcadia, whose territory included the factory. There was no rule forbidding contact with the New Arcadians, but people thrown together in any life situation tend to keep to themselves. And so it was at the factory.

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Museo Rafael Coronel, Zacatecas

In the small city of Zacatecas, I didn’t hear much talk about the local Museo Rafael. Coronel. Somebody said something about “a lot of masks” there. This left me unprepared for the overwhelming beauty of the place, inside and out. It’s set in a majestic old sprawling stone compound. Half the buildings are well-maintained and half are in ruins that seem medieval, though they must date to the 1500s Spanish rule. The brightness of the landscaping and the melancholy of the ruins open a range of emotion before you even go inside. Once inside, the stone labyrinth of chambers seems enormous — Indian art, large fantastic paintings by Coronel himself, dark and demonic in theme but bright with shocking color. Then rooms full of old puppets. And the masks. You keep turning corners to find hundreds more, thousands. When the sheer number of masks finally dawns on you, it gives Kantian sense of the mathematical sublime — just from the sheer numbers. But each mask, too, is a masterpiece. But the whole thing involves weaving inside and outside of buildings, so the architecture and landscaping is incorporated into the mood of all the artworks within.

 

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