#to keep time

[andthegoldrush-blog]

The imagination craves a ghost.

Joseph Massey

[omnidawn]

[Joseph Massey has]...a kind of religious belief in the sacredness of objects unsullied by human communication, as though he wishes to reveal what the world is like without us, and without our descriptions of it in language, which has its own protocols and vectors independent of what it denotes.

--Justin Quinn, on To Keep Time

[omnidawn]

Five Omnidawn Books named Best of 2014 at The Volta!

We're thrilled that five Omnidawn books were selected as best of 2014 at The Volta:

To Keep Time by Joseph Massey

RAG by Julie Carr

Fortino Samano (the overflowing of the poem), tr. Cynthia Hogue and Sylvain Gallais

The Not Forever by Keith Waldrop

Debts and Lessons by Lynn Xu

[omnidawn]

While trees, mountains, and cloud banks garnish To Keep Time’s exterior world, the real action is internal. The outside world has light and shadow, wet moss and shrieking gulls; the mind transforms these into syllables, chants, jabber, palettes, glyphs, words, pixels, and holographs. References to vision and hearing abound, as do references to “words,” “consonants,” “vowels,” and “thinking.” In these poems, Massey’s speaker takes his own emotional temperature via angles of light, acutely aware that the senses reproduce the world only through the mind’s translation...

Maureen Thorson on To Keep Time by Joseph Massey

[omnidawn]

As he alternates between the sounds and sights of Humboldt County, Massey encounters the way 'Mind/ mirrors/ that surface,/ shape,/ the moment/ I imagine/ if I thought/ far enough/ I’d leave my/ face.'

To Keep Time, by Joseph Massey, in a Publishers Weekly starred review

[omnidawn]

A wordless- ness written into the dirt writes itself around you

from Joseph Massey's To Keep Time, reviewed in SF Weekly