Poetry. When you're ready to venture off the daily grid of life-as-planned, enter face blindness where "a fetish object is the thing / to which we want / to give and to witness" and become privy to and part of "moments your camera could never capture." You'll find no prescriptions of an average or calming sort here. Megan A. Volpert's full-length debut startles and spirits us through the invisible and daring detritus of dialogue and story, NYC and Normal, Illinois, "name pong poetry" and "copyright infringement," letters laced with love for John Yau and Roland Barthes, phantasmagoria and prosopagnosia, fecund cullings from the minds of Jacques Derrida and Friedrich Nietzsche, ambling pathos and anxious heart, and everything in between.
"I am envious of Volpert's renderings for all the right reasons: FACE BLINDNESS does not merely go beyond the boundaries of poetry as many reviewers like to tout, but rather, this woman's words illustrate the fantastic meandering streets, skyways, and mind jetties that poetry itself can build and carry us along, and even encourages us to get out of our chairs and walk with that contagious energy, impassioned scenery included. In fact, if one looks hard into the face of this book's pluralities, you will eventually recognize it belongs onstage somewhere, behaving badly and willfully, for our own voyeuristic benefit."—Amy King
Author City: DECATUR, GA USA
Megan Volpert is a poet and critic from Chicago who has settled in Decatur, GA, with her wife, Mindy. Volpert holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Louisiana State University, and is a high school English teacher as well as a reviewer for Audible. SONICS IN WARHOLIA (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2011) is her fourth collection of poems. The other three are THE DESENSE OF NONFENSE and FACE BLINDNESS (BlazeVOX [books], 2008 and 2007), and Domestic Transmission (MetroMania Press, 2007). This self- proclaimed love child of Joan Jett and Roland Barthes has performed with a wide range of poets, from Christian Bök and Andrei Codrescu to Laura Mullen and Daphne Gottlieb. Volpert has been in competition at the National Poetry Slam, is a board member of Poetry Atlanta and is Co-Director of the Atlanta Queer Literary Festival with Collin Kelley. Rooted in confessionalism and surrealism, her work has a strong interest in the performative and is also influenced by second-generation New York School poetry. Volpert is a theory junky and cannot resist rock and roll.
Reviews and Other Links
author site
Melanie Waltman @ Subtle Tea