The Casual Presence of Borders
Description
Borders exist in and are occupied by space and time ritualized by seen and unseen, known and unknown, human struggles. Mackie Blanton’s The Casual Presence of Borders captures borders present around denizens or friends gathered at bars or over coffee, over new births, over silence and meals; at nearby places of worship or warfare or death; or unvisited planets or islands of our knowledge or imagination; or the sensed presence of the cells and arteries of the human body; and human beings noticed in easy chairs, in backyards across fences, or caught crossing in woods, swamps, bridges. Blanton is driven by two concepts: the protection of fiction inhabiting poems and a guiding principle of a post-contemporary sensibility that slips through and away from modernism and postmodernism to grasp elsewhere a possible unfamiliar, hardly quite there yet, future.
Reviews
“A virtuoso of word-music, word-play, and allied neologism...this
Poet of the Head is also, in every fiber, a Poet of the Heart.” —Niyi Osundare, Author of If Only the Road Could Talk:
Poetic Peregrinations in Africa, Asia, and Europe
Author Bio
Mackie J.V. Blanton (M.S., Ph.D. in Linguistics at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL) has written essays on linguistics, poetics, scientific and technical discourse, Louisiana dialects, and Sufi and Hasidic sacred languages. His current research in Critical Theory Linguistics analyzes the nature and structure of thought as a Sacriture suggested by subtle, often subconscious thought experiments or contemplative thinking underlying the meditative practice of language in scientific discourse and literary expression. Dr. Blanton has traveled extensively in North Africa, East Africa, West Africa, Europe, and Asia Minor, and he is a native of New Orleans, Louisiana
