Spotlight on TQ36: Reviews by Aarik Danielsen of Cassandra Manzolillo & William Huhn

Both reviews underscore BlazeVOX Books’ ongoing commitment to publishing distinctive and innovative voices in contemporary poetry. We extend our warmest congratulations to Cassandra Manzolillo, William Huhn, and Aarik Danielsen for their outstanding contributions to the literary conversation — and to Tupelo Quarterly for its continued support of independent literary art.

We are delighted to share that Disapparitions by Joseph Harrington has been reviewed in the latest issue of Mid-American Review (43.2). Our gratitude goes to editor-in-chief Abigail Cloud and reviewer Caleb Edmondson for the generous and insightful attention given to this remarkable book.

Edmondson beautifully captures the spirit of Disapparitions, noting how Harrington “writes, ‘Poets are people who hear and see patterns emerge, and rearrange them.’ Harrington’s hybrid work travels relentlessly through time, using the vehicle of radio transmission to frame considerations of death, the afterlife, war, race, the surveillance state, and the impact language has across the various mediums upon which it is carried.”

The review highlights Harrington’s achievement in weaving autobiography, lyric poetry, and historical reflection into a seamless and compelling form. At its heart, Disapparitions is an exploration of the word “spook”, ghost, spy, and racial slur, and how those layered meanings reverberate through history and language. From the “Lincolnshire Poacher Variations,” in which Harrington reimagines cryptic Cold War radio transmissions through poetry, to the closing meditation “The Eyes,” the book continually invites readers to tune into hidden frequencies and reconsider the patterns of our existence.

We are thrilled to see Disapparitions receive such thoughtful recognition. Congratulations to Joseph Harrington, and many thanks again to Mid-American Review for celebrating this work.

You can find more about Disapparitions here: https://www.blazevox.org/shop-1/p/disapparitions-by-joseph-harrington?rq=Disapparitions

BlazeVOX [books] Turns 25: A Silver Anniversary Celebration

A Century of Living, A Lifetime of Writing: Cornelia Veenendaal Publishes Sky of Sudden Changes at 100

BlazeVOX [books] is delighted to share new praise and conversation surrounding Mary Newell’s latest collection, ENTWINE. Recently reviewed by Catherine Gonick at Lightwood Press and featured in an in-depth Q&A with Deborah Kalb, Newell’s book continues to spark dialogue about poetry’s role in our ecological moment.

In her review, Gonick highlights how Newell’s poems “invite us to participate in a world where human perception is porous, where the line between self and other dissolves into interspecies interconnection.” Through her attentive observations, of hummingbirds, creeks, birch trees, and the shifting Hudson Highlands landscape, Newell reminds us of both the beauty and the precarity that define the more-than-human world.

The recent Q&A with Deborah Kalb offers readers a glimpse into Newell’s process and vision. Asked about the origins of the book, Newell explains that most of the poems were written over the past two years in the place she has called home for more than a decade: “I live near the Hudson River, at the edge of a woods that extends up to the Appalachian Trail.” This setting provides fertile ground for her ecopoetic inquiry, blending scientific attention, embodied perception, and a spirit of reverence.

For Newell, the title ENTWINE speaks to the mutuality of relation: “Entwinement is an active form of relation where differing life forms or individuals can sustain one another. Many flowers cannot bloom without a pollinator’s touch.” This vision of adaptive co-evolution permeates the collection, and as David Appelbaum observes, her work “gathers, in a mood of ‘adoptive co-evolution,’ the symbols of nature, the murmurings of the heart, and the aspirations of the spirit.”

Beyond poetic craft, Newell’s background in botany, biology, and neuropsychology informs her ecological sensibility. Her studies enrich what she calls “deep inhabitation of a terrain,” an approach that allows her to perceive the hidden continuities and ruptures shaping our shared environment. In her words, ENTWINE is “an ode to this environs, to both its vitality and its precarity, and a query into interspecies relations.”

ENTWINE is available now from BlazeVOX [books]. Readers can enjoy the full review at Lightwood Press and the full Q&A with Deborah Kalb here.

Two Poets, Two Visions: Sheila E. Murphy & H.L. Hix Reviewed

Beginning at the Left by Peter Siedlecki

Exegetes of the Inorganic Soul: The Poetics of Daniel Y. Harris’s The Posthuman Series

A Glowing Review of Alan May’s Derelict Days in That Derelict Town in the Alabama Writers’ Forum


We’re thrilled to share a glowing new review of Alan May’s Derelict Days in That Derelict Town: New and Uncollected Poems, recently published by BlazeVOX [books], and now featured in the Alabama Writers’ Forum, reviewed by poet and critic Jason Gordy Walker.

May’s collection is praised for its “absurdity, concision, and playfulness,” qualities that run through his compact free verse, prose poems, and visual experiments. Walker highlights the poet’s versatility across forms, noting everything from shape poems like “Snow Globe” to narrative-laced prose poems like “The Washed-Up Actor.” His voice is unmistakably May’s: witty, deadpan, and full of surprises.

The review identifies May as a fabulist as much as a poet, working in a surreal register that invites comparison to James Tate, while grounding his work in the physical and psychological landscapes of rural Alabama. Though May avoids overt regionalism, there’s still “gravel and humidity around his diction and syntax,” as Walker beautifully puts it.

A standout element of the review is its attention to the poet’s recurring character of the boy, an isolated figure whose strange inner world comes vividly alive in poems like “The Boy and the Monster.” May’s poems invite empathy without sentimentality, often pivoting from absurdist imagery to moments of emotional clarity, even tenderness.

In perhaps the most revelatory section of the review, Walker points to the sequence “Rural Epigrams” as the book’s emotional and artistic high point. Here, May fuses the concision of haiku with the epigram’s bite, delivering lines that are both memorable and mysterious. The deadpan minimalism of “Nocturne” and the skewered beauty of “Tomato” reveal a poet at ease with both wit and lyric image.

The review closes by affirming what so many readers already know: Alan May may be playful, even mischievous, but his poetry is anything but frivolous. With references to decaying churches, anti-war satire, and the quiet death of a stray cat, May’s work wrestles with real life as much as it dazzles with imagination. Derelict Days in That Derelict Town is a book for readers who love surrealism, fables, dark humor, and the unexpected beauty of forgotten places.

We are proud to have published this remarkable book, and even more excited to see Alan May’s work receive the thoughtful attention it deserves.

Read the full review on the Alabama Writers’ Forum website and order your copy of Derelict Days in That Derelict Town today!

We are thrilled to share a brilliant and insightful review of Gloria Frym’s new book, Lies & More Lies (BlazeVOX, 2025), written by Alissa Hattman and published on April 29th. Gloria Frym is a literary force — poet, essayist, and thinker whose work has long challenged the complacencies of American culture. And while Lies & More Lies may have flown under the radar since its release, this review reminds us why Frym is one of the most vital and fearless writers working today.

Hattman’s review approaches Lies & More Lies with the keen attention and intellectual curiosity Frym’s prose demands. What emerges is a rich appreciation of Frym’s hybrid collection — a blend of flash fiction, satirical essay, poetic prose, and cultural critique. It’s a taxonomy of deception that captures the insidious presence of lies in every corner of contemporary life: political, personal, historical, and structural.

From the brutal truths of “War is Always a Lie” to the everyday deceptions in “Proper Working Order,” Frym offers a portrait of a world unmoored by duplicity. As Hattman puts it, “While lies vary in definition and scale, lying is insidious because it is the norm.” This truth — both despairing and urgent — beats at the heart of the collection.

Hattman makes sharp connections between Frym’s work and Hannah Arendt’s meditations on the political function of lying. Frym’s book resonates deeply with Arendt’s warning: that when people feel alienated, lies become not only persuasive, but foundational. Frym writes, “I personally began to lie like a thief whose very freedom depended on the narrative.” The results are chilling, but also darkly funny, cleverly structured, and delivered with Frym’s trademark incisiveness.

And yet, as Hattman notes, the collection isn’t just a catalog of corruption — it is also a call to clarity, to witness, to resistance. In the closing pages, Frym writes: “You air that serves me with breath to speak, we can’t breathe.” That line — echoing both Whitman and the call of Black Lives Matter — stops us in our tracks. It asks us not only to see the lie, but to reckon with its cost.

Alissa Hattman’s generous and perceptive review is a long-overdue recognition of Frym’s newest work. We hope it brings many more readers to this fierce and unforgettable book.
🔗 You can read the full review: https://www.smokelong.com/review-gloria-fryms-lies-more-lies/  📘 Lies & More Lies is available now from https://www.blazevox.org/shop-1/p/lies-more-lies-by-gloria-frym  

Walking America 6 Ann de Forest, Ernesto Pujol & Susan M Schultz SD 480p

14 views Jun 10, 2025

Video of the sixth instalment in Walking America for a conversation about dogs and the humans who walk with them – and write about them. Does walking with a dog enhance the experience of walking? If so, in what way? For poet Susan M. Schultz and walking artist and writer Ernesto Pujol, walking with dogs offers a means to meander, to shift perspective, and to marvel again and again at the oddity of the humans they encounter, sometimes affable, sometimes confrontational. Schultz’ latest book, More Lilith Walks, proceeds as a series of snapshot-sharp vignettes recounting her daily walks in Oahu with her dog Lilith over the two years leading up to the 2024 election. Pujol’s novel, The Dog Walker of Philadelphia, is set just before the COVID pandemic in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood where social tensions run high. In both books, the canine species’ blissful ignorance of politics exposes the absurdity of humans’ arguments and divisions.

Book Launch: Motion Detector by Drew Gardner
Release Date: Thursday, June 5, 2025
Published by BlazeVOX [books]

“Setting things right / takes the example of a unifying contradiction.” —Drew Gardner, Motion Detector

BlazeVOX [books] is thrilled to announce the release of Motion Detector, the electrifying new collection from Drew Gardner—poet, musician, and long-standing innovator at the intersection of avant-garde poetics and lived experience.

In a world increasingly defined by rupture and resonance, Motion Detector is tuned to the shockwaves. These are poems alive to the beat of our uneasy century—charming, charged, and beautifully strange. Gardner composes verse like no one else: each line a note in a score of resistance, intelligence, and absurd delight.

“Gardner composes perfectly ironic music for those ‘alive without warning’ in menacing times.” —Laynie Browne

“Never stasis by mundane detour… always sustained by kinetic by original origin.” —Will Alexander

“Poet as ‘resonating chamber’… armed with the ‘disciplined kindness’ to defuse it.” —Rodney Koeneke

Gardner’s poetic voice is unmistakably his own, but if you imagine a meeting point between the radical gestures of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry and the personal immediacy of Frank O’Hara’s “Personism,” you’ll begin to feel the vibrational field of Motion Detector. These poems don’t sit still—they spark, pivot, and surprise, speaking from inside the engine of power with humor, lyric intensity, and philosophical depth.

Drew Gardner is the author of Sugar Pill, Petroleum Hat, Chomp Away, and Defender, and the editor of Ingenious Pleasures: An Anthology of Punk, Trash, and Camp in Twentieth-Century Poetry. His work has appeared in Poetry, The Nation, and Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology. He lives in New York City.

Order your copy now and join us in celebrating this dynamic new book of poems.

📖 Book Details

• Title: Motion Detector

• Author: Drew Gardner

• Pages: 90

• Binding: Perfect-bound paperback

• Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]

• ISBN: 978-1-60964-494-9

• Price: $18

🛒 Buy the book here

BlazeVOX Celebrates Two Finalists for the 2024 Big Other Readers’ Choice Award!

We are thrilled to share some wonderful news: two of our titles have been honored as finalists for the 2024 Big Other Readers’ Choice Award! This is a tremendous recognition not only of the individual brilliance of these books but also of the spirit of adventurous publishing that drives BlazeVOX forward.

Please join us in celebrating:

• 🏆 David Trinidad’s Sleeping with Bashō – Finalist

• ✨ Tony Trigilio’s The Punishment Book: The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood), Book 4 – Honorable Mention

Each year, Big Other gathers recommendations from an incredible roster of writers and critics—including Jane Ciabattari, Terese Svoboda, David Naimon, and others—to highlight some of the most exciting and innovative literature being published today. We are honored to find two BlazeVOX books recognized among these singular works.

Dear Readers,

The Spring 2025 issue of BlazeVOX25 is now live. This season, we turn our attention to the margins—those spaces unclaimed by utility, economics, or private ownership. The works gathered here ask questions rather than offer answers, tracing the outlines of what literature can become when it resists the pressures of commodification and instead engages in acts of aesthetic and political refusal.

Contributors explore the porous borders between self and world, between architecture and memory, between the known and the speculative. Through formal rupture, associative logic, and language shaped by the contingencies of place and time, these texts intervene in the prevailing narratives of late capitalism and gesture toward new modes of meaning-making.

We invite you to step into the issue:🔗 Read BlazeVOX25 Spring 2025

You’ll find the full list of contributors and a brief introduction from editor Geoffrey Gatza.

Thank you for reading, and for staying with us on the strange and luminous edge of what literature can be.

https://www.blazevox.org/blazevox-journal/blazevox25-spring-2025

This spring, we’re thrilled to celebrate BlazeVOX [books] author Gloria Frym, whose work continues to resonate and evolve with remarkable energy. April and May are bringing a flurry of Frym-focused activity — and we are here for it! From a featured poetry publication, to a sharp new review, to a live reading in Berkeley, Gloria’s voice is ringing out in all the right places.

✨ New Poem Featured for National Poetry Month

As part of Chaudiere Books' National Poetry Month celebration, Gloria Frym shares a stunning new poem that expands her ever-curious, ever-precise poetic terrain. Posted as Day Eighteen of the month-long series, this piece reminds us why Frym’s work continually commands attention — it’s razor-sharp, expansive, and playfully self-aware.
➡️ Read Gloria Frym’s featured poem here

🌀 A Fresh Look at Lies & More Lies

rob mclennan, one of poetry’s most astute readers, dives into Frym’s latest BlazeVOX collection, Lies & More Lies, with a characteristically insightful review. He writes, “Reality. We’re not at the beginning of the beginning. Or at the middle of the beginning. We’re not at the end of the beginning. We’re at the beginning of the middle.” Which is to say — Frym’s work continues to shift the coordinates of truth, voice, and perspective. A must-read for fans and newcomers alike.
📚 Check out the full review on rob mclennan's blog

📣 Live Reading in Berkeley – May 4

Mark your calendars! Gloria Frym will be reading live alongside the incomparable Maxine Chernoff on Sunday, May 4 at 3:00 PM PDT, hosted by Poetry Flash at the Art House Gallery & Cultural Center in Berkeley. This in-person event promises an afternoon of poetic brilliance, with books available for signing, refreshments, and the full creative community experience.
And if you can’t make it in person — don’t worry! A video of the reading will be posted on the Poetry Flash YouTube channel.

🗓 Poetry Flash Reading
📍 Art House Gallery & Cultural Center, 2905 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley
🚇 Two blocks north of Ashby BART
📅 Sunday, May 4, 3:00 PM
🎟 Free admission, with refreshments!

From the page to the podium, Gloria Frym is blazing through this season with the kind of brilliance and clarity that reminds us why poetry matters. Pick up a copy of Lies & More Lies from BlazeVOX [books], tune in to her new work, and don’t miss the chance to hear her read live.

Stay luminous, Gloria — we’re cheering you on from every corner!

—
BlazeVOX [books]
“Exploring the frontiers of innovative literature”

Three Unique Voices, One Vibrant Press: Recent Praise for BlazeVOX [books]

At BlazeVOX [books], we champion voices that move with originality, experiment boldly, and express the heart’s deeper rhythms—whether through poetry, prose, or something in between. We were delighted to see Midwest Book Reviewrecently feature three of our most recent titles on Arthur Turfa’s Bookshelf. Each work—distinct in tone, form, and focus—adds something vital to the conversation of contemporary literature. Here’s a look at what Turfa had to say:

Hip Hip Hurray!! Charles Borkhuis reviewed Self Geofferential in the Compulsive Reader. It’s an excellent review from a dear friend, and fine poet. 

Here is a link:  

https://compulsivereader.com/2025/04/02/a-review-of-self-geofferential-by-geoffrey-gatza/

Self Geofferential is available for purchase herehttps://www.blazevox.org/shop-1/p/self-geofferential-by-geoffrey-gatza