Babylon Redux by William Teets drops on September 16th! This is a collection of gut-punch conversations with the Holy Ghost in back-alley shadows, liquor and nicotine-stained confessions from steamboat docks to mountain tops, hellhounds and glass scraped against concrete written with heart. Heavy words pulled in from the four corners of memory that linger in a place beyond ourselves. Evoking faith in the belief that everything will be right in the end. Life goes on.
Featuring 69 poems broken up into three parts, an introduction written by Steve Chisnell of Waywords Studio, and cover art by JDCIV.
INTRODUCTION:
When I imagine a metaphor for what William Teets does to his poetic subjects, I imagine a dishrag wrung to extremis, the gray water splashed across the drain at 2 am, its flotsam left for close examination. Sure, the bar or countertop or back seat of the Thunderbird now looks clean–and, oh, that magnificent bespangled “looks!”—but the detritus of human experience lay there just a moment before, didn’t it? Go ahead, smell it. No volume of bleach, however sacrosanct, can quite hide it. No, we’re back in the broom closet squeezing out the truth of it beneath the crusty 60-watt bulb. Some of what we find is a rescue, a salvageable enlightenment or fragment of innocence we’ll hang onto a bit longer, and some is . . . the rest of us, naked and in pale skin, socially aborted, adrift in the effluence.
We’ve been welcomed here before. Not that the invitation was formal or its offer enticing–we had illusions to build. But in Babylon Redux, William Teets’ poetry is a standing summons to meet, anyway. To shed our skin. To dance, weep, and gnash teeth. To know that when, at the end of our work and nostalgia, some ritual drum or alleyway shadow will signal requital.
Teets’ verse and prose tear words across the fabric of the page, a tactile tone of disavowals and loss, rage and jazz and blues. Reading Babylon Redux is not an homage to Beat poets but a reinvigoration of rejection and resistance, of lives straggling forth through our modern and postmodern dissonance, raising the scraps of culture as shields against charlatans.
BACK COVER BLURBS:
With signs and symbols and signifiers, beneath the grandiose and eloquent, the tarnished veneer of pop culture glitz and dusty literary allusions, William Teets’ poetry collection, Babylon Redux, brings the mighty. With the poetic voice of an antiheroic minstrel cleric, who shouts lullabies, croons screams, and walks metaphoric streets and alleys of disillusionment, Teets proves once again the Beat Generation is not extinct, that Babylon lives as a voice in the new wasteland of America. And only after you’ve smoked too many cigarettes and drank too many doubles—have finally decided the dream is dead—does this book of poems rail against modern antiquity and decay and edge-of-despair dystopia, offering a slender prospect at absolution and salvation.
–Gabriel Sebastian, Founder/ EIC, confetti magazine, Founder/CEO Wordwerks, Inc.
Does bringing back Babylon speak to a corrupted baptism of our times or a renewed call to resistance? Is it too tardy a warning of our destination or a whisper of old/new wisdom? In Babylon Redux, William Teets’ poetry answers, “Yes. Yes. And yes again.” And if by chance we happen to be one of the few who are lucky, drinks are on the house, songs are sung, and someone–maybe alone, maybe with you—will sacredly dance.
–Steve Chisnell, Waywords Studio, author of Unwoven, host of Literary Nomads podcast