Phaneagrams

"Phaneagrams – with its near-minimalist poetics and extraordinary compression of language – is a tremendous achievement. It is a successor to the expansive, visionary lineage of the Dante-Blake-Whitman continuum." - DeVillo Sloan "Jake Berry, visionary of the present, bringing the present back to us from its mutated nightmare future. Rescuing the past from a fictional present built on nostalgia for a fictional past. In fragments of aphorisms. In small zen-like stories told in the lyric mode of Williams and Creeley. That fact tells us what, exactly what, about living in these times. There are no alternative facts. This is not the post-truth era. The voice of William Blake is everywhere in these poems, He carries /the old abyss /in his chest. A piece of an aphorism, aphorisms in pieces... tells us, tell us... why and how "aphorism" shares an etymolo-gical history with "horizon": Wheels the tongue /miraculous; the salamander /dreams /feathered wings." - Jim Leftwich