Book of Ain't - Michael Crossley

Chat Rooms #1

Foreword

"The sound of the poet roams through the landscape from Ohio to Montana to New Orleans to San Franciso to old Mexico to various Parts Unknown (and even some Parts Known) & back again, landing (mostly) in North of West ("where conifers utterly overwhelm their broader leafed brethren / dog lichen and cascara / salal and basalt / sitka shooting roots down into the shallow / soil, loose under the rocks"). Like a marriage of Rimbaud & Frances Farmer, or: a marriage of Whitman & "the Satanik girls of Instagram" (if not a Marriage of Heaven & Hell), Crossley's Book ov Ain't presents the / a / one epic poem of the final Americas that narrates the deconstruction of transcending all the destruction, the (despite all the) complication-contradiction-amputation-collection-of-occasions (Americans--and maybe just humans, as a group of hairless apes--only survive to narrate by writing from and in that space/place & usually writing through to outside if not beyond time).

I just happened to look out my window while writing this and in a quick-flash observed two doves doing the act (it was a quick-flash, indeed) that (possibly/eventually) makes for the replication of more doves on an early spring afternoon, which reminds me that Crossley's poetics are concerned with a continuum, however disrupted, broken, or even delirious (something poets from Theodore Roethke to Frank Stanford to Prince would recognize, I must suspect, although what I suspect is my suspicion is simply: fact). What Crossley's book of not poems but of poem within his / the one poem of Ain't does primarily (but not only) is remind me of a question it never hit me to ask until I read Crossley's words & received the answer, so that I may only now ask the question now, already knowing: what if Charles Olson & Johnny Thunders together wrote a libretto for an opera concerned with investigating occult Seattle on mission to solve the riddle of the Sphinx by solving the riddle of the looming symbol of (the Self-Annihilated) Kurt Cobain?

Ah of Aleph. Alpha. Ah-Numa. Suspir-Ah. Poetri-Ah. Divinit-Ah. Sacr-Ah. Nil as in: Babylonia/Mayan. Sanskrit as in Sunya. Vi as in: to swell. Sifr/Arabic: the root of zero & cypher. Decartes: proof of God in the meeting point of: infinite vs. void = zero. The balance point of negative vs. positive. This is all leading to me to applying (some of) my studies regarding what that could be of Self-Annihilations, which is to say also: of Ain't.

Full disclosure: I've been in conversation with Crossley's poetics since the 90s when we both were barely more than 19 in some place the Shawnee never called "Kentucky," until I thought that the poet became a dead man in the early 21st century (to be fair, I've died a few times, myself) only to discover that same man a few more years later in another decade walking Seattle like Lazarus--putting the tongue back in washing--with a folio of fresh verse under his arm as if he'd not only never died but actually ascended while remaining & consequently here I find myself collaborating with that awakened sleeper of a poet, putting lines to an inky Cobain triptych to decorate a corner of the cathedral of Book ov Ain't, astonished of its architecture, serving as the foundation for my own humble application of image to some of its surfaces, suddenly observing myself in the blitz of one of the poem's barroom mirrors in the guise of some graffiti writer at the complex of temples to be found at Philae in Nubia (back when the Byzantine Empire was still in her training bra).

If the ancient Egyptians viewed death as travel to regions Westerly (to die as a verb, as in to die is: to go Westing), Crossley's art exists somehow above, which is to say: North of West. It's not Ain't exactly; it is of a Book. Of a book, from the book: "The history of man is a short / And violent affair / Plagued with wars and hopes unrequited / It’s not enough to mark on the cave walls / To just scrawl silhouettes / In some crude cuneiform / As a hasty recording / Of a condition." The poet's Ain't represents much more than "not enough." Like any poet worth more than a grain from the pillar of salt that Lot's wife left through looking behind, that is to say: by not only becoming but composing himself, Crossley has written his / the / our future from the all of our ashes, collective dooms be damned."

JT Dockery

___

Michael Crossley is an executive chef, writer, musician, and spoken word performer currently residing in Seattle WA. This is his fifth published collection of poetry. His previous titles include Still Life… With Drinks, and Some Girls received positive reviews in the regional literary scenes of his home (Ohio, Kentucky). His last chapbook, Dead Letters 843, was turned into the debut album In Tongues by the band French Letters. Much of his early work is archived in the Weston Gallery in Cincinnati and some of his marker tags can still be seen in certain pockets of the cities mentioned herein.

***orders will ship by mid-august***

Releases July 25th, 2023