Certain Slants
by Charles Alexander
ISBN 978-1-881523-16-1
2007, 156 pages, poetry
$16

Published by:
Junction Press
PO Box F
New York, NY 10034

Reviews

In this oblique exploration of natural history, Charles Alexander brings us the world as an intimate gesture, a speaking through water. He manages to make autobiography universal and the great outdoors deeply private, and all through his love of language. That’s, finally, where his attention lies–in the crystallized sentences and vibrant phrases that flit like bright birds through his rich mental landscape.
—Cole Swensen

Charles Alexander gives us certain slants, various slants, oblique angles into this world, poems written with considerable grace, integrity, and a tentativeness that becomes an ethical gold standard, its own sounded out wisdom, a hold on things as the book artist writes, “phenomenon of binding without / the least bit of stitching.” So, tell the truth but tell it slant; this book, truthful, and telling.
—Hank Lazer

arc of light/ dark matter
by Charles Alexander
ISBN 0-937804-46-0
1992, poetry, 71 pages
$8

from section 7 of arc of light/ dark matter

7
speaking of mesostics, most of which are prepositional, stunning a wave, from a crowd of people on the loading dock being noisy, a fractured sense of linearity, interconnectivity on the tongue, then someone came up to me, glasses until there is no need for drinking, framed by inconsistency, upon a shore where wave suns the rock of present tense before trickling away, too fast for me, according to accordions, wind as a function of musicality, toys which duplicate the operations of a desert military tactician, storms to distribute sand, having run off the road in a remote part of Africa, vehicle where none was desired, to be certain there are beaches there, close to where the bombs fell, convincing the coeditor, say it was four hundred and thirty two of this kind and three hundred and twelve of the other, what would that mean in a context of indeterminate poetics, who determines the density of the bombing patterns, floating into the deepest part of the fragmentary nature of things, what one never would have considered next, not that the terror could ever be thought to be so close or planned in a corporate office, formica on top, a cooling brought on by a sequence of popsicles, not to not to, charlatans though they be, utilizing a new instrument to monitor the apathy of voters before administering the drug, where foals rush in, freed from any sense of context, an inevitable failure, previous to ethics, alarming how considerate the managers of war can be when they are relaxing at home, an inviolate sense of fluoridation, if the word on the corner can be believed, a sexual overflow, not the last light on the street between the places where they live separately, not coordinated by a sign, of fish, pieces to make alive together

Review

In designing a circle of stones about a pool for a zen garden, one would take a single rock and move it ever so slightly out of alignment, knowing that the mind's eye would then have to respond, participating in the creation of circularity itself, a far more powerful, vivid effect. Gertrude Stein employed this same gestalt principle of the absent subject in her portraits and in Tender Buttons, enabling language and meaning to suddenly blossom like the unfolding of a rose. Now Charles Alexander pushes the envelope of what is possible in writing even further, to the ends of the universe. And beyond. What begins in the eye as a paragraph becomes in the ear a line, 53 of them in fact, one line poems rich with news, life, war, sex, parenting, the texts at hand, the spicing of mulled thought, humor, bright southwestern colors, and an ear to die for. The comma, that pointer, the least understood of all our elements of punctuation, shapes, modulates, paces "a phrasal rhythm denying the sentence," leading the reader onward, inward, "winged-static, designed to repsond abundantly, falling forward into technology writing a program or batch of phrases to imagine a universe where bent light is generosity and peace with no desired for stasis..." This is the most sensuous, intelligent, rewarding writing I've read in ages. -Ron Silliman

Hopeful Buildings
by Charles Alexander
ISBN 0-925904-03-1
1990, poetry, 169 pages
$9.95

Description:

Includes six works: A Book of Hours, Side Riding, Inside Moves / Punctual Matters, Hopeful Buildings, An Eye for the Distance, and Twenty-One Tales (plus

Reviews:

"This book collects six works, different from each other in many respects, but all moving with a strong investigative force. Thinking is the experience of everyday living, and Charles Alexander's work is a poetry of thinking. But it is experience, not difficulty, that wonderfully complicates these poems and brings them very close. I hope many people will read Hopeful Buildings and take great pleasure both in its detail and in the larger construct that the details, perceived, provide. I do."
--Lyn Hejinian

"Intensive systems here make possible extensive readings, across textual times and places. This work hears a complex literacy of literalizing words. By means of a fencing of statements, sense is found rather than determined. The real is as thought."

--Robert Creeley

"Twenty One Tales," the last section of Charles Alexander's Hopeful Buildings, performs an articulating excursion into a crystalline world of linguistic intensities variously marshaled against the proclivity of grammar to foreclose sense. No measure less precipitous is permitted entry to these stately galleries of elided stanzas."
--Charles Bernstein

Charles Alexander's previous books of poetry include Hopeful Buildings (Tucson: Chax Press, 1990), Arc of Light / Dark Matter (New York: Segue Books, 1992), and Near or Random Acts (San Diego: Singing Horse Press, 2004). He lives in Tucson, Arizona, where he directs Chax Press, publisher of letter press and trade editions of poetry, in a studio shared with his wife, the painter Cynthia Miller. A former director of the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, he has taught at Naropa University, the University of Arizona Poetry Center, and Pima Community College. He is the current winner of the Arizona Arts Award.