Description

Izzy Oneiric

ISBN 978-1935084-98-3
86 pages: $16.00
March, 2016

Through narrative persona poems, appropriated texts and updated remixes of canonized works, Crossing Bryan Ferry and Other Poems explores the destabilization of language and its effects on identity in an accelerated culture.  While paying homage to marginalized people and fantastic places, this work strives to evoke empathy and recognition while illuminating the recesses of the splintered lyrical self.

Like punk patches stitched to a well-worn denim jacket, Oneiric’s poems constellate a collection of lives, or proclaim the DIY-ness of one life that’s been fully lived-in. “Almost at times a witch, a bitch, a / Stitch on the gaping wound of time” Oneiric stirs up the voices from the inside and the other inside—the stripper, the porn store clerk, the professor, your mother’s voice on the answering machine—and patterns them into a fabric of living, frayed and tender with wear. Sliding between prose and a poetry of fragment and sound, Crossing Bryan Ferry goes in one ear and stays there: “ ‘Can I have this?’ ” we ask, and Oneiric answers, “‘I don’t know. Can you take it?’”     
—Jenn Marie Nunes, author of AND/OR

Izzy Oneiric pays homage to “the similitudes of the past” while deftly recasting the patriarchal canon of male authors. The love song of Eliot’s Prufrock has been transplanted with karma (“Downstairs, the waitresses bemoan / Their fallen arches and Al Capone”), and other widely anthologized poems are commandeered and recharged for the twenty-first century. Here, verse rubs shoulders with singers, strippers, and actresses, and a poem like “Sunday Morning” evokes both Wallace Stevens and The Velvet Underground as it steers a journey all its own. Crossing Bryan Ferry and Other Poems is rich in measure and juxtaposition, and the resulting effect (like Busby Berkeley) spins its kaleidoscopic charm to the shores of America and beyond: “Someday,” Oneiric announces in this electric debut, “the Eiffel Tower will be mine.”
—Michael Robins, author of In Memory of Brilliance & Value