In charged, synesthetic bursts, Adam Fieled charts the formation of a poetic consciousness.   This collection of prose poems spins out the epistemological memoir of a seer. Transporting us from an early sketch of thought's babyhood to a boyish hand tracing a girl's knee, Fieled's slices of insight fuse music, flavor, memory and word in an effortless union.   Ephemeral and sublime, Chimes lures us in for a bite, until, with the poet, we remember to "experience moments as a kind of eating: I was hungry and I did."

—Amy King

At times so painful and lovely and fragile that Chimes made my mind's eyes weep.  My body's eyes, however, refused to cry as they did not want to stop reading-- Chimes paradoxically is a page-turner even as the words compel you to linger on each page.  Chimes is one of the most moving autobiographies I've read--actually, language's beauty makes it irrelevant whether this is fiction or non-fiction; its authenticity is felt to be true.  It is language dreaming of song and so it sings until the most tone-deaf reader can, through dream and a most gentle delirium, inhabit its world.  For the reader, too, Chimes thus is "not an is but [a] being." Adam Fieled accomplishes what The Catcher in the Rye did for him and that he wished to replicate: that by "words demonstrat[ing]...potential for continuity," he "give[s] people back themselves."  Quite logically, the book's ending is a beginning: the being as forever a continuance .  That is, "continuance...an excitement and a way of still existing."

—Eileen Tabios

Chimes is autobiography in point form—high points, low points. How we change as we grow up & what makes us do so. Change in musical tastes—Beatles superceded by the Stones, one of the true transitional points of youth—how relationships change, how Father is found to be a Friend & then is lost as another transition occurs. The discovery of the opposite sex, the end of youth, & yet another beginning to it. How growing up is personal but full of universal discoveries. In his recent books, Adam Fieled has shown himself to be a master of the focused series of poems. In Chimes , a beautiful sequence of shortish prose poems, he is at his most masterful.

—Mark Young

 

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Adam Fieled is a poet based in Philadelphia. He has released two chapbooks, "Posit" (Dusie Press, 2007) and "Funtime" (Funtime Press, 2007), a collaboration with Andrew Lundwall. His first book, "Opera Bufa", is out now from Otoliths. A second book, "Beams", has been released in e-book form from Blazevox Press. His third book, "When You Bit...", is due out from Otoliths late this summer. Scantily Clad Press has just released his e-chap "Revolver." A fourth book, "Chimes", will be released by Blazevox in 2009.