{"id":17519,"date":"2016-03-07T11:00:13","date_gmt":"2016-03-07T16:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.michiganquarterlyreview.com\/?p=17519"},"modified":"2016-03-07T11:00:13","modified_gmt":"2016-03-07T16:00:13","slug":"small-press-snapshot-timeless-infinite-light","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.lsa.umich.edu\/mqr\/2016\/03\/small-press-snapshot-timeless-infinite-light\/","title":{"rendered":"Small Press Snapshot: Timeless, Infinite Light"},"content":{"rendered":"

Timeless, Infinite Light is a small poetry publisher based in Oakland, but to put it that way is to sap the force out of their astonishing vigor. They are a press of the dark matter of consciousness as a nexus between heritage and the glitter of possibility, of otherness as a radical force of nature blowing tenderly but insistently against the contemporary structures of power. Their \u201cbooks are spells for unraveling capitalism,\u201d as they put it themselves, and they \u201cbelieve in the radical potential of collaborative, hybrid, and embodied writing.\u201d<\/p>\n

I have been in love with what has grown out of these ideas. They are a collective in the messiest, truest senses of the word. They operate out of the Omni Commons in North Oakland (along with organizations like Counter Culture Labs, Material Print Machine, Black Hole Cinema, and Sudo Room). They routinely retain authors to help with events, promotions, and production work. And they thrive on both a local and dispersed community of artists and poets and in a creative machinery that repurposes materials; records happenings; and finds marriage in collaborations of text, image, and performance\u2014all efforts that unsettle deep-seated literary conventions. What I love most, however, is how they make me rethink the book.<\/p>\n

So I wanted to talk just a little bit about just that, their books. If you\u2019d like to learn more about the press itself, you can, of course, go to their smartly designed website<\/a>, or check out this deep conservation with author Ivy Johnson and editors Emji Spero and Joel Gregory<\/a>. But for right now let\u2019s take a quick and loose look at three of their recent publications.<\/p>\n

~<\/p>\n

\"levitations\"Levitations<\/em>, by JH Phrydas, published in November of last year. Rob Halpern\u2019s blurb describes the project well, as an \u201codyssey of transfiguration, using its lines to build new architectures for nonviolent habitation.\u201d It\u2019s this idea of building and architecture: the design, with its section illustrations, echo architectural drawings, and Phrydas\u2019s lines themselves shoot in intersecting trajectories that build up and outward, from the self to the dwelling to the city, balancing a fine tension between angularity and the organic: \u201cThese are architectural blueprints of a written animal, snarling. \/ Emerging, it lies in the laps of citizens. \/ A water-birth into language.\u201d<\/p>\n

Phrydas eventually populates his city with a variety of approaches, throwing lines left and right justified, falling into a deep and often anaphoric meditation, and blocking out prose poems that pan across their scenes, such as this acute one from \u201cWe Hope Daily to Witness Collapse\u201d:<\/p>\n

Her sidelong glance a red flash not fire but fading sun against the rough surface of glass. And in the street a form, upright against the sun, shoveling ash along brick byways. A pale on the horizon that begins to bend. Workers covered in soot, leaving impressions of shoulders during cigarette breaks along these stucco walls.<\/em><\/p>\n

The project is thrillingly diverse and often haunting in its imagery at the same time that it can move with incantatory power.<\/p>\n

\"blackIf Phrydas rafters his way upward, Angel Dominguez, in Black Lavender Milk <\/em>(published in December, 2015) dives downward, into ancestry\u2014specifically, the Mayan cenote as a gateway to the underworld. The book \u201coffers the space of a \u2018novel,\u2019\u201d according to the publisher description, \u201cas a site of mourning, inquiry, and recuperation. Through a complex, hypnotic blur of language, the lyric-as-novel functions as an extended meditation on Writing in relation to the Body; Time, Loss, Ancestry, and Dreaming.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dominguez writes with lush prose: \u201cI return to the orchard in dreams. The land grown wild with distance; time smudged violet, the citrus trees gave off a dim aura; years of night left, scattered. I cycle my blood through these words.\u201d His attempt to reconcile the death of his grandfather, to enact a burial, is deeply personal and yet steeped in the traditions and spiritual structures of a collective existence. These structures are startlingly present in an otherwise familiar world (something I\u2019ve noticed a lot in Timeless, Infinite Light\u2019s books): we aren\u2019t just in dreamscapes but constantly reawakening in the profane, real world. Dominguez moves between worlds\u00a0 particularly well. Look at how he does it in this airplane assocational fever poem, a flight home, when he leaves the underworld for the heavens (the section illustrations throughout the book are all photographs taken from a plane, which nicely contrast the humid jungles and mysterious cenotes that are otherwise our primary locales):<\/p>\n

From above the earth we witness the vast blank expression of time, disappearing. The power goes out in the house you grew up in. You fail to grow up. You fail to return; instead, you wake up on this flight, reading this book by an animal you don\u2019t know; I washed my paws before coming aboard; did you do the same? I burned my wrist opening my body in the desert. I broke my toe in Tucson. I opened portals with bodies of light. Andrea taught me to think like a magi. I\u2019m learning to be alive, turning myself inward. I know where to find it. The desert of my heart, I bury the night sky. . .<\/em><\/p>\n

\"oilThe scale of Black Lavender Milk <\/em>can\u2019t be overstated, nor its ambition, though it shares a similar one with many of Timeless, Infinite Light\u2019s projects\u2014this drive toward opening the body up to the mind, and the mind up to the unknown; a headlong pitch into the mystical. It\u2019s something that Gabriel Ojeda-Sague, <\/em>in his forthcoming Oil and Candle <\/em>(publishing in the tract <\/em>series, March 2016), does in a more steadied and concentrated way. In this book, Ojeda-Sague sets out a project of limpias<\/em>, or cleaning, as well as path-opening, through the burning of an abrecaminos candle\u2014recording his experiences in verse and, along the way, exploring a variety of heritage spiritual practices and beliefs from the Latino\/Caribbean tradition.<\/p>\n

Ojeda-Sague frames his experiment with anecdotally humanizing, honest, funny, charming\u2014and also moving\u2014vignettes, such as this one, when he realizes that he doesn\u2019t know how to respectfully dispose of the burnt out abrecamino candle:<\/p>\n

since it was my<\/em>
\n first time and I had<\/em>
\n to call the botanica<\/em>
\n and ask and the<\/em>
\n worst part is<\/em>
\n I had to google<\/em>
\n the word for dispose<\/em>
\n because I had<\/em>
\n forgotten and didn\u2019t<\/em>
\n want to be so<\/em>
\n informal and just<\/em>
\n say \u201cponer en<\/em>
\n el zafacon\u201d and<\/em>
\n they said I really<\/em>
\n should just put it<\/em>
\n in the trash which<\/em>
\n felt weird to say<\/em>
\n the least but I did<\/em>
\n it and in my dorm<\/em>
\n the trash is a long<\/em>
\n metal chute not a<\/em>
\n bin and I had to<\/em>
\n hear it go all the way<\/em>
\n down after asking<\/em>
\n myself is this<\/em>
\n recyclable<\/em><\/p>\n

It\u2019s such a vulnerable scene, and it is in stark contrast to when Ojeda-Sague does enact the ritual and record his experiences, and it seems like the more serious project gets underway\u2014especially in the final long poem of this book (the book actually ends, in my advanced version, with \u201cbonus material\u201d–Jeffrey Cheung\u2019s fabulous linocuts and a sneak peak at Jai Arun Ravine\u2019s forthcoming The Romance of Siam, <\/em>both quite enticing art pieces). In this long poem, Ojeda-Sague records his meditative journey in in an abrecamino and Tarot ritual, finding heights of extraordinary language. Here is a particularly good example, I think, a moment of luminous difficulty:<\/p>\n

the Kevlar comes into the soil<\/em>
\n in advantage of bordering<\/em><\/p>\n

distance leaves artifacts<\/em><\/p>\n

the soft<\/em>
\n sleeps<\/em>
\n in a glitch<\/em><\/p>\n

decoding the govern,<\/em>
\n my uncertain lover<\/em>
\n is hitting the ground<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2014<\/em><\/p>\n

most days<\/em>
\n it isn\u2019t easier than this<\/em><\/p>\n

finding<\/em>
\n the door<\/em><\/p>\n

Timeless, Infinite Light seems to be a hitting a particular stride with their output, promising several more titles this year. The range and diversity of their list looks to be expanding, and I am eager to see what else they will bring in, how they will treat it, and what pathways they will open up. Progressive, urging, necessary\u2014but often playful and loose\u2014their books so far succeed at constellating rich personal, mystical, and cultural experiences and help establish further and further outposts of the possible; for a reader like me, it is these sorts of projects that offer one of the more viable visions for the future of radical poetry.<\/p>\n

\"TIL<\/p>\n

Lead image courtesy of Timeless, Infinite Light’s Facebook page<\/a>. More information is available on Instagram<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, and Tumblr<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Timeless, Infinite Light is a small poetry publisher based in Oakland, but to put it that way is to sap the force out of their astonishing vigor. They are a press of the dark matter of consciousness as a nexus between heritage and the glitter of possibility, of otherness as a radical force of nature blowing tenderly but insistently against the contemporary structures of power. Their \u201cbooks are spells for unraveling capitalism,\u201d as they put it themselves, and they \u201cbelieve in the radical potential of collaborative, hybrid, and embodied writing.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2139,"featured_media":17619,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center 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