issue four: guest-edited by Anthony Etherin

NOW AVAILABLE: G U E S T #4
edited by Anthony Etherin

see here for Anthony Etherin’s introduction and biography

the fourth issue features new work by:

Clara Daneri
Billy Mavreas
James Knight
Stefan Mohamed
Luke Bradford
Lucy Dawkins
Petra Schulze-Wollgast
Derek Beaulieu
Sacha Archer
Christian Bök


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Author biographies:

Clara Daneri is an artist and illustrator, exploring the relationship between digital and traditional media. She runs Penteract Press and tweets @ClaraDaneri.

Billy Mavreas is a Montréal based artist and writer of Hellenic heritage, working in the zone between text and image, producing more-or-less regular comics as well as abstract comics, word-based poetry as well as visual poetry and asemic writing. He operates a curious art space in Montreal called Monastiraki.

James Knight is an experimental writer and digital artist. Void Voices, his reimagining of Dante’s Inferno, was published by Hesterglock Press in 2018. Website: thebirdking.com. Twitter: @badbadpoet.

Stefan Mohamed is a poet and author based in Bristol. His novels Falling Leaves and the Bitter Sixteen Trilogy are published by Salt Publishing, and his poetry collection PANIC! is published by Burning Eye Books.

Luke Bradford is an experimental poet living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His latest collection of constrained poetry, Glossology, is available for free download as a PDF or for purchase as a book at lukebradford.xyz/glossology. His work has been published in print and online by Spacecraft Press, Penteract Press, Timglaset, Utsanga.it, and ToCall magazine.

Lucy Dawkins is a British-American model, poetess and world wanderer. You might find her over on Twitter, playing with words, @lucykdawkins.

Petra Schulze-Wollgast (psw) is an artistic discoverer of old printmaking techniques and has her printing studio in Rostock, Germany. She creates abstract typographics with typewriters, Letraset alphabets and metal type letters. She experiments with an old Gestetner 320 mimeograph and prints on a letterpress proofing press, turning her works into artist's books. www.psw.gallery

Derek Beaulieu is the author / editor of 20 collections of poetry, prose and criticism including two volumes of his selected work Please No More Poetry: the poetry of derek beaulieu (2013) and Konzeptuelle Arbeiten (2017). His most recent volume of fiction, a, A Novel was published by Paris’s Jean Boîte Editions. Beaulieu has spoken, performed and exhibited his visual work across Canada, the United States and Europe and has won multiple local and national awards for his teaching and dedication to students. Derek Beaulieu was the 2014–2016 Poet Laureate of Calgary, Canada and is Director of Literary Arts at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.

Sacha Archer is a writer that works in numerous mediums as well as being the editor of Simulacrum Press (simulacrumpress.ca). His work has been published Internationally. Archer has two full-length collections, Detour (gradient books, 2017) and Zoning Cycle (Simulacrum Press, 2017), as well as a number of chapbooks, the most recent being TSK oomph (Inspiritus Press, 2018), Contemporary Meat (The Blasted Tree, 2018) and Autopsy Report (above/ground). His neglected website is sachaarcher.wordpress.com. Archer lives in Ontario, Canada.

Christian Bök is the author of Eunoia (Coach House Books, 2001), a bestselling work of experimental literature that has gone on to win the Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence (2002). Crystallography (Coach House Press, 1994), his first book of poetry, has been nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award (1995). Nature has interviewed Bök about his work on The Xenotext (making him the first poet ever to appear in this famous journal of science). Bök has also exhibited artworks derived from The Xenotext at galleries around the world, including (among others) the Bury Art Gallery in Bury, the Olga Korper Gallery in Toronto, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, the Power Plant in Toronto, and the Broad Art Museum in East Lansing. Bök teaches students of Creative Writing in the School of Creative Arts and Humanities at Charles Darwin University.

Anthony Etherin : issue four : Introduction : "Pyramids"

Poetry is an act of chronogeometry. It distinguishes itself from prose by submitting to premeditated or extemporised structures, be they rhythmic or visual (or both).

          When I started Penteract Press, in 2016, I wanted to build a venue for poems that fully embraced and celebrated their structures.

The penteract is a five-dimensional cuboid: What the cube is to the square, and the tesseract is to the cube, so the penteract is to the tesseract. It is a higher-dimensional platonic solid: simple yet complex; structurally pure, yet spatially transcendental. This reflected the poetry I wished to promote: I wanted both the traditional and the avant-garde: sonnets and sestinas, rondels and villanelles — but also strictly constrained experimentalism and visually radical forms.

Just as great verse seeks perfection by a distillation of language (“the best words in the best order”), so the ancient Egyptians sought spiritual perfection by a distillation of form. The astonishing precision of the Great Pyramid of Giza’s measurements is a testament to the sacred power humans assign structural purity.

          When rob mclennan asked me to guest edit this issue, I wanted a theme that would reflect my interest in structure-based poetry, but which would also evoke the very human need to look beyond. The pyramid, whether as a geometrical object or as a sacred monument, seemed a fitting theme.

The breadth of ideas and styles I received was astounding. Featured in this issue are ten poets: We have visual poetry, both digital and analogue; we have lyrical poetry that speaks both of and with geometrical precision; and we have a variety of literary restrictions.

          I would like to thank each of these contributors for their thoughtful responses to my submissions call — and a big thank you also to rob, for inviting me to temporarily take the reins of this fascinating journal.

A zig. Now one zag. Gaze now on Giza!—

Anthony Etherin is an experimental formalist poet. He founded Penteract Press (www.penteractpress.com) and he invented the aelindrome. His published works include the collections Cellar (Penteract Press, 2018) and Danse Macabre (above/ground, 2018). For more of his poetry, find him on Twitter, @Anthony_Etherin, and via his website: anthonyetherin.wordpress.com