No
he is not an urn singer
nor does he carry on rapport
with negative forces within extinction

 

he is the brush fire singer
who projects from his heart
the sound of insidious subduction
of blank anomaly as posture
of opaque density as ash

 

he
distanced from prone ventriloqual stammer
from flesh
& habit
& drought

 

the performer
part poltergeist & Orisha
part broken in-cellular dove
part glance from floating Mongol bastions

 

where the spires are butane
where their photographic fractals are implanted with hypnosis

 

because he allegedly embodies
a green necrotic umber
more like a vertical flash or a farad
posing like a tempest in a human chromium palace

 

therefore his sound
a dazed simoom in a gauntlet
a blizzard of birds burned at the touch of old maelstroms

 

because he gives off the odour of storms
this universal Orisha
like a sun that falls from a compost of dimness
out of de-productive hydrogen sums
out of lightless fissures which boil outside the planet

 

yes
he sings at a certain pitch
which has evolved beyond the potter's field
beyond a tragic hummingbird's cirrhosis
surmounting primeval flaw
surmounting fire which forms in irreplaceable disjunction

 

under certain formations of the zodiac he is listless
he intones without impact
his synodic revelations no longer of the law
of measured palpable destinations
because he sings in such a silence
that even the Rishis can't ignore

 

as though
the hollow power which re-arises from nothingness
perpetually convinces
like a vacuum which splits within the spinning arc of an
intangile solar candle

 

such power can never be confusedly re-traced
because
it adumbrates & blazes

like a glossary of suns
so that each viral drill
each forge
casts a feeling
which in-saturates a pressure
bringing to distance a hidden & elided polarity

 

like a subjective skill
corroded & advanced
he sings
beyond the grip of a paralytic nexus
where blood shifts
beyond the magnet of volume
where the nerves no longer resonate
inside an octagonal maze
stung at its source by piranhas


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The domain of poet Will Alexander's nervy curiosity ranges from the icy Himalayas, to African savannahs, from physics, astronomy, and music, to alchemy, philosophy, and painting. Orishas, angels and ghosts all sing to this poet, instructing him in their art of verbal flight. This is a poet whose lexicon, a "glossary of vertigo," might be culled from the complete holdings of a reconstituted Alexandrian library endowed for the next millenium.
--Harryette Mullen


Will Alexander's writing is "movement / as dialectical alterity." In reading Above the Human Nerve Domain, one recognized that what one thinks and one's corpus are both "subjective exclusivity." On this "language of disrupted ghosts" thought is corpus, "a body condensed in grace."
--Leslie Scalapino


Will Alexander's dazzling Above the Human Nerve Domain embraces the here and now, the after and before. Scanning its images, words roll around the mind's cavernous tongue. There is the feeling of being lost in the returned gaze of this quantum diorama, here primary and human, here blended apart from itself. But upon second seeing confusion seems to evaporate and the gaze of the diorama seems simultaneous with our own. The inner and outer don't cease to exist but are given equal footing to comment on one another "in which mnemonic trance / co-intuits" as we're reading this writer "with active double eurekas."
--Diane Ward


"This glorious set of whirling prosodic proofs exult that a body can be struck by stanzaic facts of light. The reader is dazzled by expanding forms of predictory anaphora arriving as an "instantaneous beam." The author of Vertical Rainbow Climber, Arcane Lavender Morals, Asia & Haiti, and The Stratospheric Canticles has done it again with strobic precision.
--Norma Cole