Divine Blue Light (For John Coltrane)

Praise forDivine Blue Light: The 'invisible current' Will Alexander channels in the meteoric poems of Divine Blue Light is not surreal escape but vibrational engagement-an engagement with the infinite streams of the heart of being. -Jeffrey Yang, author of Line and Light As Trane, before ever receiving the primary note, had to have seared sound into sound, through sound, by the fate of neural flash accreting in a palace of blind dexterity, absent logistics of causal burden, where all creativity is honed ( poised against self-inflicting ozone assaulted while living in my crazed silo of indifference ), Will Alexander maneuvers within language that is antebreath to the invisible as improvisation ( concerning billions & billions / of curious antecedents ) via birth canals of dream static. For example, I once saw Will change the weather, as easily as one might slip into a second, third, or even fourth kimono, and with a single perfect utterance. Like agua tilting itself into a god, Will's texts suffuse the horizon of Poetry with the abstract purity of their oceanic movements ( as phantoms blazing in & out of consciousness ), sun-condensing, dissolving seemingly endless sight into a disappearing instant of the Miraculous ( as if skilled interior prognostication had erupted as visible number ). Divine Blue Light exists by what it exudes. -Carlos Lara, author ofLike Bismuth When I Enter Praise for Refractive Africa (2021), finalist for 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry: Since the 1980s, the Los Angeles-based Alexander has mixed politics with mesmeric, oracular lines. -Greg Cowles, The New York Times This visionary act of 'transpersonal witness' to a continent is an Afromodernist epic in the tradition of Kamau Brathwaite's The Arrivants. ... Refractive Africa embraces an aesthetic of sprawl and overreach, summoning free-flowing visions of grandeur and desolation. Alexander, an American, is the author of more than 30 books, and his introduction to a British readership is overdue. -The Guardian There is likely no poetry more propulsive, visually kinetic, and intricately layered than that composed by Will Alexander. ... Alexander's seemingly over-rich language and ideation establish an imaginative realm that is entirely unlike any other, one in which we are immersed in sheer, coruscating energy. ... Embodying an intensity of feeling that brims close to overwhelming, these poems bear persuasive witness to the history of Africa, of colonialism, and of Black selfhood and resistance. Too much on these themes, Alexander asserts, is not nearly enough. -Hyperallergic Powerful and visionary. -The Skinny Praise for Will Alexander: A long-distance runner extraordinaire, Will Alexander parses and devours information, code and arcana lest they parse and devour him, parse and devour us. What but deep seas and distant galaxies would make such a demand his extended soliloquies implicitly ask and overtly answer. -Nathaniel Mackey Alexander's voice speaks to its situation-social, political, ecological-in the Anthropocene. ... Anticipating a collective leap of human consciousness comparable to the Mind's original emergence in Africa, Alexander reports on the 'world as it is today' as if from a standpoint in the future, from an alterity in which this momentous leap has already occurred. -Andrew Joron, Caesura Cosmological, astrological, philosophical, geological, mathematical, and hypnogogical in scope, Alexander finds concordance in chaotic discord. Like a force of nature, a procession of seamless symbols, the lines roll out as variant strata compress into a crystalline composite. -Jeffrey Cyphers Wright, The Brooklyn Rail As we spin toward planetary suicide at the hands of oily capitalizers, it will be the prophetic words of poets such as Will Alexander, with their imaginal radiance, which hold any hope of lighting the way to a true alchemical amnesty and new modes of being. -Dorothy Wang, author of Thinking in its Presence It is tempting to label Alexander a surrealist or experimentalist, but he is truly a singular voice. -Citation for the Jackson Poetry Prize Alexander's verbal flights strike me as more shamanistic than free-associational or automatic. His evocation of upper and lower worlds, and his vocabulary which bridges poetry, philosophy, myth, and science, give his verbal fulgurations a sense of linguistic seed that suddenly sprouts, then resprouts ... He may be the first major 'outsider artist' in American poetry. Whatever he is, he is a force to reckon with ... -American Poet Alexander's comfort and willingness to discuss occasions beyond our normal daily experiences excites the imagination with the warmth of ecstatic re-envisioning. This is writing that opens up new worlds, crisp and direct in its offering of unique and valuable gifts. -Rain Taxi A vastly under-appreciated and important avant-garde poet, who deserves a wider audience. -Huffington Post