Kirjahaku

This one's about something "consumer" and "odd". In my previous collection, "Graffiti on the Window", I made a conscious effort to appeal to a very specific subset of readers and the work was kind of academic. It incorporated a lot of the themes of the eclectic, the crazy, the verbose, and the ethereal. This book's a little different than THAT one. It is more open to subtle suggestion, has less intense visual cues, and shorter poems. It represents not a vision for the schizophrenic artist would-be "dictator", but rather a series of "poem portraits" designed to be concise, drawing upon multiple "visible" layers, as with a painter painting something more restrained. It's an attempt at being more aesthetically pleasing and stylistically accessible, with an underlying attempt at abstract, disconnected images, words, emotions, ideas, and especially FANTASIES (realized or unrealized, or purely unattainable) of a gutter poet chronicled, proper, aged 13 to 24. With no desire to be subsumed under the label "schizophrenic" or "manic-depressive". "Graffiti" was something stoners and sociologists may dig; this one is more for everyone...well, okay, maybe not EVERYONE. But I don't care. Turn the page and see it all.;) A.S.

The eclectic, disorganized, and manicky 28 year old Kansas poet, journalist, & satirist, Alexej Savreux, transplanted from New England and the realm of the Jack Kerouac School for Disembodied Poetics brings us his third collection of poetry: "Asoak in the Knight's Moat". While academicians and literary critics have hailed previous collections (particularly "Graffiti on the Window") as "spellbinding" and "reminiscent" of more traditional forms written hundreds of years ago. "Asoak" is written from the vantage point of Alex the "ritalin kid". At once uncontrolled craziness, bizarreness, and highly intimate, "Asoak" is a very peculiar collection derivative of the incomprehensible content of The Cantos or Naked Lunch, only from the pen of a twenty-something who claims to need a "drip" of ADHD medication. Some poems are satirical, others, mere observations, journal entries, ideas, frustrations, chants, notes, interviews, equations, diagrams, goodbyes, prayers, concept poems, one-liners, and Savreux, armed with his trademark sardonic, pompous wit entices the beauty (and nefariously sentimental) out of a world mired in verbal and existential schizophrenia. Again, not so much a modern poet. Savreux is in his own world, and it is in that world that he thrives. And very few subjects are left out. Overall, "Asoak" is a poignant journal of idiosyncratic, colorful, and inventive poetry that shouts and whispers -- and even: "screams".

We sent one man, and all men, one woman, and all women, like an Odysseus manic depressive psychosis, schizophrenias, in the middle of the Sea calculations, grease pencils and mad, mad, mad, scribblings of a frantic mind, bipolar disordered, hydrogen Boom . . . the cathedral of the skull and son of Santi . . . braggart not, we took back, we Poets, and Artists pulled, insignificant but significant. We imagined the Kingdom of Angels woven of Globes & Fabrics Free We imagined our deaths, deathless imagining our fronts in We We imagined our Soul in Body, the excitement, Jubilee We calculated the Land of formless physicality & Hallucinatory Renaissance We pushed our way through the fortresses of impregnability. We sailed it tight against the tide and wrote on our caves going back, back, back, to time's beginnings and ambitions. We imagined the Thinkers & Masters, at work on the Puzzles of Life Dancing Fabulous tales & concocting the elixirs of Amazement. I imagined I was an Eagle. I knew I was an Eagle. I knew I was an Angel, like all Angels & Eagles Aeterna without Wings We felt ourselves Fleshed Prophets, Spirits of Splendour & a Faucet of Exploding Fountains..We took home many gifts and brought back the mind and body, and we partook of the gifts and sufferings of both, we bought the evolutionary rights to all the thoughts of God . . . from Euclid onward, we hitchhiked to the edge of the galaxies and came with no vision of before or after, to the other side, to all sides. O, I knew not of the masterless odours . . . the casks rioting in History's wine cellars. the Gods of virtues, & the millions & millions & millions of weary Heads laying upon the Chests of those who knew not their greatest Solemnity. There is a reality behind reality, and everything elsewhere. Sail on we did indeed; however, not said. We left a-mess amid the squabbling of the untapped prodigiousness, Where the Gods, Graces and Suns slaked like shining Beacons upon Cities of White Night. I do, too, imagine the Fields where Light Bends, & Sunlight Grants, Where the emergence of feasts & banquets & wreaths ensnare to form a perfect Whole We imagine the extraordinary Bells chiming an ever present Knell. The all consuming appellation Poeta. We forfeited the plight of happiness for the Bath of rejuvenation. We & I imagined sending tickets on the trains of timelessness . . . we emptied our heads, only to have them fill back up like Byron's skull wine cup, no drink, to empty the head forever and always . . . . . . Until our individual and collective pens, pencils and quills run out of ink, and Scriptures writ Holy with the imperishable ink of indissoluble Fortune hast sealed all infinite Souls supple, full of inexorable life. GRAFFITI ON THE WINDOW. . ]