Tag: art

Coming Soon from CMP, Vital Decay by Timothy Dodd

James D. Casey IV

Sorry for stumbling on the names and poems. I’ve been running the ship full-speed-ahead for y’all since being home from Gonzofest! I’m getting tired, but I plan on going until the sails fall down.
🏴‍☠️

Big Love, Write On,
JDCIV
🤟💀📚
🦉🎟️🦇

Vital Decay by Timothy Dodd will be released on August 16th!! Which also happens to be Charles Bukowski’s birthday! Everything just fell into place that way. I thought that was pretty cool. Keep your eyes peeled for more details! Hope y’all dig the poems I chose from each section. Sorry if I fucked them up, brother Dodd, and Ace’s name.

Vital Decay by Timothy Dodd
cover art by Timothy Dodd

“Timothy Dodd writes with the energy and frenzy of a man being chased by assassins, hell hounds, the police. His words race across busy highways. They jump from tall buildings but land on their feet. They vanish into dead-end alleys as though a door opened in one wall then closed behind him. The poems in this book are vivid descriptions of scenes mixed with meditations on life-meanings and interplays between the sacred and profane. Dodd stares into the abyss and doesn’t blink. Vital Decay is a marvelous collection and a wild ride. Strap yourself down for this one.”
—Ace Boggess, author of The Prisoners and Escape Envy.

“Timothy Dodd plays with words, to play with readers’ perception and reception, not unlike Gregory Corso, but at times his observations are also acerbic, not unlike Charles Bukowski. His overall concept of the people populating his poetry as full-blown characters — not mere extensions of himself, the poet — is a semi-biographical approach that reminds somewhat of Edgar Lee Masters. To combine elements of such poets as these in one voice, and then to have a unique voice in the midst of such influences is no mean feat.

VITAL DECAY will push you, as much as pull you along. Some poems lean towards prose, while others are highly imagistic, and some concrete, while others near a blend of magic-realism. This explains lines such as “Like a Halloween mask / she arrived at pavement…”

Dodd namechecks Denton Welch, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Ronnie James Dio, and you can see their shadows looming over some poems. There is little distinction between high culture and low culture in the inspiration and the references in many of his poems, and in so doing this poet’s voice is less encumbered by the cultural bias and classism, that makes the street poet and the academic poet most easily recognizable, quantifiable, and readily fitted for a label – anything from Camus to Marvel Comics shows up in Dodd’s poems. These approaches encourage a certain unpredictability, that in turn opens one up to being caught off guard, one’s cynicism challenged, coerced into an openness of possibility: one never knows what the next poem will bring.”
—David Alec Knight, author of LEPER MOSH (Cajun Mutt Press, 2022), recipient of The Ted Plantos Memorial Award For Poetry, 2021.

Cajun Mutt Press Featured Writer 05/05/23

James D. Casey IV

Arguing With Myself Over Sushi

Standing in line for buffet sushi
when an adult-looking version
of my adolescent self
emerges from the body
of my current self
scornfully asking if I’ve lost myself
causing me to crumble my fish roe
into a tray of Tuna roll.

I think about telling
the unburdened version of myself
a defeated man
can bleed enough
to change the world

instead I relay
what I learned about love
after a poorly crafted double date

love lies at the intersection
of Science and Art

when the integers and perspectives
have been
mapped

you may end up marrying
the woman
who is currently
trying to bang
your roommate

but if you keep your compass pointed north
there is reason to believe
you can be more than
the life the universe delivered you into.

Considering your devotion to myth
I surmise
philosophizing with you
would be like the relationship
between masturbating
at Thomas Paine’s funeral
and a tree falling in the woods

if there’s no one around
to debate the metrics of morality
then who’s gonna fucking say anything.

Stricken with a sense of superiority
I assert the high ground

drawing a dick vacationland
across the pimpled grill
of my immaturity.

Waterskiing
dicks
cutting the wake.
Dick golfers fighting sand traps.
Volleyball dicks
spiking the line.

Consumed by the desire
to outgrow the limits
of my vocabulary

instant karma
taking agency
from some theoretical
form of alien limb syndrome

still not having realized
I’m using the same words
just holding a different flashlight

my younger self
reversed directions
taking the marker from my now self
drawing havoc causing dicks
across the goofy man-face
of my maturity.

Dick pilots bombing
the intersections
of my perfectly creased brow.
Pirate dicks pillaging
the astute fields
of my engaging cheekbones.
Dick ninjas descending
the cracked lines
of my auspicious nose.

As my immature self retaliates
drawing dicks on my current self
the drawings appeared
on my immaturity.

The outward expression
of my inner moral argument
layered with dead fish
& avocado

finding common ground
in the unsympathetic
language of dick jokes

confident
that even though heroes
make better sandwiches
than people

there is no way to tell
the difference between
buffet sushi
and enlightenment

without being willing
to get covered in dick drawings
and fish.

©2023 Jeff Taylor All rights reserved.

Jeff Taylor

Jeff Taylor lives with his wife and kids in Massachusetts where he has been writing poems since the late 90’s and hosting The Garage Poets Open Mic since 2020. Jeff has performed at universities, theaters, festivals, bars, coffee houses, and sidewalks across the east coast and to global audiences online, you can find his work in recent issues of Bombfire Lit, Ethel Zine, Oddball Magazine, as well as upcoming in anthologies from Read or Green Books, Cooch Behar, and Alien Buddha Press.

!! COVER REVEAL !!

James D. Casey IV

After the Fall by William Teets is coming soon from Cajun Mutt Press! Recently finished painting the cover and putting the interior file together. Waiting on a proof copy. I’ll post some photos when it gets here.

After the Fall is a poetry collection that offers resurrection for a damaged Americana-spirituality: Blues music and barrooms, whiskey and smoke, rivers and haunted highways, leather jackets, hoodies, and Sunday’s best. . . and worst. William Teets’ poetry navigates corrupted streets, turns dangerous corners, and worships in darkened alleys. All in an unending quest for absolution, salvation, and answers.

“I often toss The Paris Review across the room after reading their poetry selections, because I all too often long for poetry to mean something. Nothing is more frustrating than reading poetry that is merely meter, failing to explore anything except that which the poet sees. Subtext is a rarity in today’s modern poems, and I think it may have to do with the lack of life our poets live. William Teets lacks neither life nor subtext. The poems in After the Fall are honest and hard-hitting. They may not be pretty, but you can’t look away. I will revisit these works often.”

G.W. Allison—author of The Final Round and The Sinful.

“William Teets writes poetry like a fallen jazz-blues-folk pagan priest. His narrative style is free and open and easy to read, but the subject matter deep and spiritual. I am reminded of the old Beat poets—can even see some Dylanesque qualities. His poems have that lyrical tone (Check out “Chillin’ with Chelsea” to see what I mean). After the Fall is for anyone, not just lovers of poetry.”

Gabriel Sebastian—Confetti magazine chief editor and founder and CEO of Word Werks, Inc.

After the Fall by William Teets

Cajun Mutt Press Featured Writer 12/07/22

James D. Casey IV

Mine Is A Different Darkness

My darkness holds
not a candle to the alarming ease
with which so many speak in their negative,
their cynical, as if second nature, to their speech.

Each dig they make; each ‘dis’ spoken,
their every pithy putdown pouncing,
seems as natural to them as if
their every predatory respiration.

Theirs is a different darkness.
It has nothing to do with that which
is real, but that which they conceive
before they perceive, in mean spirit.

My knowing darkness
is cast from the flicker of flame.
Their darkness slithers
ignorantly from lesser shadows.

©2022 David Alec Knight All rights reserved.

David Alec Knight

While in high school in Chatham, Ontario, David Alec Knight and his parents were told by a teacher there that he would be lucky to finish high school, and certainly wouldn’t make it through university. One of David’s English teachers, Bernard Cameron, saw something in his poems though and encouraged him to pursue his writing. He also attended workshops led by the poet, Ted Plantos, when he was writer-in-residence at the Chatham library.

David’s poems have appeared in the recent anthologies, By The Wishing Tree (2021), Poets For Ukraine – Volume 1 (2022), Muse (2022), and Love Lies Bleeding (2022). Recent poems have appeared in Verse Afire, Cajun Mutt Press, and The Lothlorien Poetry Journal.

David’s work journeys honestly through darkness before there is any light, so it is well-earned and substantial when there is reprieve. He speaks with his own voice, but he acknowledges as inspiration and influence, Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, Gregory Corso, Charles Bukowski, Irving Layton, Ted Plantos, E. J. Pratt, and Paul-Marie Lapointe. Margaret Atwood’s Journals of Susanna Moodie and Irving Layton’s A Wild And Peculiar Joy are most reread in his library.

Since graduating from St. Clair College in 2014/15, David has worked in healthcare as a Personal Support Worker. In 2021, he was recipient of The Ted Plantos Memorial Award for Poetry. The Heart Is A Hollow Organ, David’s first book, soon followed.

Leper Mosh (Cajun Mutt Press) is David’s second collection of poems. It is dedicated to his high school English teacher, Bernard Cameron (RIP).

“David Alec Knight’s ‘Leper Mosh‘ is an amalgamation of beauty and darkness. From waxing nostalgic about a youth of heavy metal, horror films, and comics to turning mirrors into windows of a woman’s soul, this book hits with full-throttle force. Even at its more bittersweet or softer moments, there is an underlying edge that runs the gamut of this book. With lines like: “Outside, distant sirens prowl. We reach for the first dark and our desires make light,” Knight’s repertoire of emotive language makes ‘Leper Mosh‘ a poignant read and a definite keeper. Any fan of poetry will love this book.”
—Heath Brougher, editor-in-chief of Concrete Mist Press

“The secret Knight is letting the reader in on… Well you already know, but you hide from it, you ignore it, you bury it. But, there is no getting past Knight’s willingness to dive into the morose, the malaise and the madness of life. This collection of poems is filled with gems and insight, and an unflinching look at a life unfurled.”
—Rob Azevado (Don’t Order The Calamari, Turning on The Wasp)

LEPER MOSH by David Alec Knight

US
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BFWJ41G9
CA
https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0BFWJ41G9