Channel: Features

I wish I had been a child then // long, slender / circular years / peeled years / sloshing around / in the fluids of my thinking

What are we to make of a poem that begins “None of this happened:” except to see where the author takes us, what other tricks she has in store, what detours we must take?

An FBI raid on a grave-robbing missionary; stolen sacred objects; ancient artifacts; hundreds of human remains; fears of an atomic weapon in a remote farmhouse. And even, perhaps, the wrath of spirits.

A virgin will rebuild from ash the burning library at Alexandria. She will not take any prisoners. Her large eyes will be tests that you must pass. For a third time will the Argo sail, outperforming Voyager One. You will learn of how this ship is not different from your body. It will move beyond the speed of light.

Language has served as a way to bridge a perceived gap between consciousnesses who believe themselves to be separate. By another reckoning, language has served as a crutch to help us hobble through the woundedness of feeling separate.

In this essay, I explore the Somali lullabies from a close reading of their texts. While singing their love to the babies, Somali women also express their sentiments towards social issues that reflect women’s traditional roles in the pastoral society.

This chapter from Richard Andrews’ debut novel has a bit of everything: sex, humor, tragedy, adventure… and of course, music. In these pages, we meet young Chris Hunter and his Aussie bandmates, just after a terrible accident has derailed their dreams of making it big and changed their lives forever.

“AI, will you write this poem for me? / AI, will you give me a hug? / AI, will you read my daughters a bedtime story?”

These three inaugural releases from a label that “focuses on quality and works out subtle differences in each work” offer a range of sounds, textures, and objects to explore.

The little screen illuminated my pillow in a pool of light. I knew it was wrong of me to set up the profiles, with names like “Shining Star” and “Dark Forest”, but I was feeling lonely and vindictive. My fingertips swiped across photos and words.

Surrender & let go. Do not Skip Ad. The ontological flood is here. Aperspectival madness and shamanic psychosis are all yours via this DEEPSnakes original.

In a work that blurs the boundaries between futurism and very recent history, wild imagination and straightforward reportage, this piece takes us through the phases of tumultuous transformation in our present/future shock. Reality ain’t what it used to be. Enjoy the ride.

A new series of gouache paintings that combine natural and geometric forms, exploring cycles of growth and momentum. Inspired by Tai Chi and the blossoming of flowers, these works manifest as the explosion of a geode or the life cycle of a bloom, driven by the commonality of momentum.

In Geoffreyjen Edwards’ science fiction novel Plenum: The First Book of Deo, the Prologue tells us that we are about to experience the first act of young “gender-neutral” Vanu Francoeur’s triple-volume story. Which is also the first act of a 15-volume …

Properly speaking, shadows are not those places where the light is blocked. In the earliest reconstructed languages, those places have no names, though the proto-word for shadow does exist. Shadows were the beings that lived in those places of blocked light. Through the corruption of time, they have lent their name to their native homes, been subsumed by them, been forgotten.

With his first book recently published, essayist, poet, and artist Brian George reflects on the bizarre and often humorous ways that great works of the past were received by their contemporary critics, and how changes in the cultural landscape over the last few centuries—but especially since his coming of age in the Boston poetry and punk scenes of the late 1970s—have profoundly altered the ways we read, receive, and understand new works.

I opened Brian George’s physically beautiful Masks of Origin—adorned with three-and-a-fraction of his own electric geometric red-green gargoyles, to find myself “reading,” if one might call it that, the whole book nearly straight-through that day, and the next…

A paean to Albert Murray and his hybrid memoir/literary criticism masterpiece of 1971, South to a Very Old Place.

“Think outside the box,” they say. What if your box is doing the thinking? Where does your thinking end and your box begin? How many boxes does it take to screw in a light bulb? The answer may surprise you.

From my very childhood, I’ve always been curious, interested, in a quest to find out what actually life is. What, in fact, is death? Where do we humans come from, and where do we go after death? Or, why we humans are on earth at all, and then die?

“The Second” was written for a speculative fiction writing workshop and very last-minute in its original form. I did the plotting and world-building on the fly, and basically the original idea was “what if the protagonist were trying to save their friend from a duel?”

There are moments when the world comes suddenly to a stop, when the ground withdraws its support, when a schism opens, into which one may or may not fall. The world then employs its archaic sleight-of-hand to remove whatever faith you may have placed in this event. The structure of projection has barely missed a beat, but the schism in your psyche has not actually been sealed…

What does Space mean to you? Do you have enough of it? Too little, too much? How do you make space… for Space? This piece was composed for an evening of Poetic Alchemy held in Boulder, Colorado, in the spring of 2019.

What if you could slow down time? In a distant, not-so-far-off future, humanity has gained the power to alter the localized flow of time at will, enabling new ways of experiencing the universe and operating in extreme environments. Here is an account of the scientific speculation that went into the concept of tempo control in my upcoming novel Plenum: The First Book of Deo.

Metapsychosis editor Mary Thaler interviewed Deniz Ozan-George, an artist based in Boston, Massachussetts. Though she’s recently completed one portrait, Deniz considers herself first and foremost an abstract painter, lyrical, and expressionist.

Susan Evans’s poem “Lucy” appeared on Metapsychosis website in Autumn 2020. During the following winter, we exchanged emails in which Susan told me about her creative process, her sources of inspiration, and what her hopes for the coming year.

Projecting human capability and knowledge into the far future, provided we learn to manage our own planet, it seems possible that humans might learn how to modify stars in ways suited to their future needs. Why might one modify stars? I can think of a …

An artist is actually creating a world rather than just a stationary object. The artist is sailing through universal winds and transmitting truth. It really depends on the artist as to how this truth manifests and is revealed.

Reminiscent of the work William Blake, Max Beckmann, and Hieronymus Bosch—to say nothing of the latter’s medieval predecessors, Antoniou’s images find their singularity in the exploration of the imaginal encounter, the sacred drama.