One Year in a Paper Cinema

Description

Poetry. "'Humans are essentially narrative beings,' says Travis Cebula in the introduction to his exceptional new work, ONE YEAR IN A PAPER CINEMA, explaining how it is that he found gestalt in a year of printed movie listings taken from local fishwrap. I have my own thoughts about how film interacts with the individual and its culture—almost all of them spoken with great insight and unfailingly more eloquence in Travis' delicate, sometimes whimsical / sometimes insistent / sometimes frustrated days. It isn't just the turns of phrase ('In the beginning / we made monsters' for instance, reminding of the best of Travis' turns like 'Under the Skies They Lit Cities'), it's the sense of an artist moving from a jab; a challenge where he speaks of balls and living free, dying hard—all the way to a wry sense of humor in sudden talk of 'wieners.' Yet it's in the moments that he wrings 'milk from pearls' that the work truly shines: there are so many dark moments of romantic dalliances and indiscretions, so much momentum in the urgent interactions and secret ministries, that Travis has done something entirely unexpected: he's reconstituted art from one medium into another, and found truth there in the internal, tonal space between a record, and to record."—Walter Chaw

"'[F]rom the belly / of the fever beast' comes Travis Cebula's procedural poetic journey into cinescape linguistics. Taken straight from the primetime movie lineup found in that now defunct public institution of shared consumer experience (a.k.a. the tv guide), familiar popular culture landmarks naturally abound. However changed, shifted, slanted and askew they may seem, treating 'meaning as a hammer / of protection, / protection as a measure / of national life.' And so it is not in the shelter of known referents that the power of these pages is most evident, but in the places where all points of reference fade into the bright black of the room Mr. Cebula has so expertly staged, leaving in their wake the masterfully crafted projections of each page... for you: the inevitable audience. There's no escaping it. Find your seat and try not to blink."—Travis Macdonald

"Nobody looks in the newspaper to see what's on TV anymore. For that kind of news, we have to go to poems—specifically, Travis Cebula's pitch-perfect ONE YEAR IN A PAPER CINEMA, whose shapely, lyrico-epigrammatic interfaces with a year's worth of TV listings in The Denver Post pull open the gauzy curtain separating 'art' and 'life' to reveal something at once fresh and recycled, mysteriously stochastic and predatorily pre-programmed. Almost as soon as this book was finished, the Post stopped printing this section. Thank goodness for the celerity of visionary poets!"—K. Silem Mohammad

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