Matthew Dickman Reviews Andrea Rexilius

Hop on over to Tin House to read Matthew Dickman's review of Andrea Rexilius's Half of What They Carried Flew Away, available from Letter Machine Editions.

Here's a snippet:

Jack Spicer believed the poems he wrote were sent through him by extraterrestrial beings. That is, he believed he was the vessel through which the news, heartbreak, strangeness, music, and the art of the “other” was carried.

I like this. I like to think about people’s creative mythologies. In an artist’s case, I don’t think the “myth” part of their existence is untrue. I believe Jack Spicer when he talks about aliens. And I believe we can see in some poets work a kind of otherworldly experience happening to them and then to us as readers. Of course, this is often translated in our academic and secular minds as purely “inventive” or “creative” imagination though there is something mysterious happening, something we can’t explain so we say: “How did he come up with that?” or “How does she write like that?”

Perhaps the “voices” from outer space that Spicer talked about are not so far from, well, outer space.

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