The Cumulus Effect, along with our other Fall 2015 titles, is now available from Four Way Books!
Meet J.Mae Barizo, author of The Cumulus Effect
Born in Toronto, J. Mae Barizo is a poet, critic and performer. Recent work appears in AGNI, Bookforum, Boston Review and Los Angeles Review of Books. She is the recipient of fellowships and awards from Bennington College, the Jerome Foundation and Poets House. A classically-trained musician and a champion of cross-genre work, J. Mae has performed sound/text collaborations with musicians from The National, Bon Iver, and the American String Quartet. The Cumulus Effect is her first book. She lives in New York City.
The sequential poems in The Cumulus Effect map how the intersections between geography, memory, and desire weave personal, unavoidable history. The book’s structure alludes to “method of loci” or “memory palace,” the ancient mnemonic technique of spatial memorization. Minimalist, but insistently mercurial, the poems move through American and European cities: seduction in an Neoclassical palace in Saint Petersburg; a “hindsight of blood” in New York City; late-summer longing in Berlin’s Senefelder Platz. Like the erratic sky of the book’s title poem, these verses are laced with an uncanny delicacy; The Cumulus Effect sets on the page a prismatic and complex topography of the body forever en route.
Praise for The Cumulus Effect
“The Cumulus Effect haunts, surprises, and fascinates the reader; as if looking at shape-shifting clouds, always in transition, we watch how the poet’s mind travels, as the past travels through it. There is absence here, and violence; memories like wounds in these reflections of a bravely summoning soul gradually moving to release the past: ‘and let us love warily, remembering nothing’ –said so humanly, in the necessary midst of remembering.” – Jean Valentine
Click here to buy your copy of The Cumulus Effect.
Interview with J. Mae Barizo for First Person Plural.
Read “The Killing Time”, a poem by J. Mae Barizo, in AGNI.
Upcoming Readings for J.Mae Barizo
Wednesday, September 30, 7 pm
Join us for a Four Way Books & Friends Fall 2015 Launch at Book Culture on Columbus (450 Columbus Avenue (between 81st Street and 82nd Street)) in NYC. J. Mae Barizo will be reading with Stephanie Ford (All Pilgrim), Owen Lewis (Best Man, Dos Madres Press), Rebecca Okrent (Boys of My Youth), and Jonathan Wells (The Man with Many Pens) and performing with musician Rob Moose (Bon Iver, ymusic).
Saturday, October 3, 7 pm
Join us for a Four Way Books Fall 2015 Launch at KGB Bar (85 East 4th Street) in NYC. J. Mae Barizo will be reading with Laurel Blossom (Longevity), Patrick Ryan Frank (The Opposite of People), Rebecca Okrent (Boys of My Youth), and Jonathan Wells (The Man with Many Pens) and performing with musician Rob Moose (Bon Iver, ymusic). Reading hosted by Britt Melewski.
For more information about readings with J. Mae Barizo and other Four Way Books authors, visit our events page and/or our website.
