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A carrier bag of poems, the voyages are nets and nests, and fields in form and nature. Imagist and imagistic, how prose poems break toward the concrete–each made of things contained and what they in turn contain. Where air is indiscriminate, the poets are tangible. There’s no trying for language beyond what is. The center holds. Interweaving solstice between art and bird, Arrieta incants. Avoid frames. Beware of detachment. Personify lotus and mud. An observed life builds logically with an economy of words, then proceeds to resist logic with the same. She carries us outward, inwardly. Or dreams persist not so far from the side of the canyon where she sits. Watch Arrieta proofread the (in)visible.
—Bruna Mori
These poems, luminous and finely wrought, light an ongoing journey in language deceptively spare, actually rich in layered fields of meaning. The book unfolds as a space inhabited by kindred creatures, artistic touchstones, stones, “dreams & clouds”—the immediacy of our multifarious world. Marcia Arrieta’s sustained, lyrically reflective mind/world infusions resonate with a sharp and profound beauty.
—David Wolf
In the voyages, Marcia Arrieta sets the stage for alchemy. These poems affirm the creative act: they search, explore, examine, meditate, cascade, accumulate, and ultimately conjure a distinctive poetics. As readers, we are invited along. We become immersed in lyric atmosphere and drift in diffuse landscapes. We wander alongside the narrator as she goes “walking & walking,” searching for—and often finding—transformative magic.
—Genevieve Kaplan
I find myself in a tangled labyrinth of hummingbird wings & gingko leaves. In memories scattered into circling celestial forests. Stand. Shift into vanishing silences beyond golden alpine orchid blooms. Invisible crumpled stones leap through fragmented voices of falling sand dandelion masks. She gathers driftwood & flying fish & crosswinds edging time. I thread horizons of celestial waves wandering through the voyages alchemy limes & tangerines.
—Randee Silv
Imagine the difference between viewing a nebula from afar—a static map on a wall—and a slow immersion within it. Between the stars lies vast space where Marcia Arrieta’s poems begin and at times compel us to create verbs that connect and activate these celestial fragments. Is this too much to ask? Not in this voyage. While filled with lemons, birds, and precise contours, this inner cartography inspires the reader to link stars and asteroids into constellations—a journey of inventive collaboration.
—José Montelongo
voyages begin with the spirit, the window, the trees, the door & continue as poetry & art & music inspire, sustain, balance—especially with the love & understanding of nature & family & friends
a wanderer of the eclectic, Marcia Arrieta continues searching for the integral within/beyond the realities
born in Santa Monica, California close to the ocean, she now lives on the canyon across from the mountains in Pasadena, where she loves to sit on a small boulder and listen to the river after a rain
the author of four poetry collections: within sky, perimeter homespun, and archipelago counterpoint (BlazeVOX), and triskelion, tiger moth, tangram, thyme (Otoliths), as well as five chapbooks: thereof, vestiges, and thimbles, threads(Dancing Girl Press), the curve against the linear (Toadlily Press) and experimental: (Potes & Poets Press), her recent book through time waves (Arteidolia Press) includes her poems, drawings, and mixed media
she greatly values & is grateful for her connection to the world across continents through her work & correspondence as editor & publisher of Indefinite Space, a language/art journal, now in its 34th year
