COMPOS(T) MENTIS by Aaron Apps

“Knuckles digging in the knee and not knowing it, while reading! To be disturbed and to be reminded of something you never quite knew. To be reminded and made to know that memory a new way, this is the way Aaron Apps gives it. Morphine drip as the scalpel tears open the new machine. The petri dish is an appetite for the borderlands of experimentation which is now shattering. You are now under the spell, you have been since you started reading it. If poetry is a way to live then I want to live with these poems, permission without question!”

—CA Conrad

“If angels represent the human idea of frictionless communication between souls, the ""fuckscapes"" of Aaron Apps's ranty, violent first book COMPOS(T) MENTIS suggests communication as beastly, ""extra-somatic,"" ""liquid infection."" Instead of the perfect, clean medium of the angels, Apps wants his medium to be ""dripping filth."" Instead of the ideal of private interiority, Apps's book pushes his poetry as a form of violence to the self, constantly brutalizing and opening up bodies with cuts and liquids. Even beauty is rubbed, ripped open and made to ""bleed ink."" Apps is not looking for angels, he is becoming a goat.”

—Johannes Göransson

"Aaron Apps's poems turn language upside down. As the reader tries to hang on to this new reality, Apps's poetic powers reimagine the connection between reader and writer. His visionary approach offer directions few poets take. This freedom of form and experience lifts this book beyond normal relationships between language and the larger world. Aaron Apps's gifts are clear. In this age of wonder, he has plunged ahead and created a sequence of poems that are one key in understanding what American poetry is accomplishing in the new century."

—Ray Gonzalez

“There is a vigor in how Apps’s agar medium bubbles forth helpless, nerve-filled tumors of language, a kind of tangle that I cannot describe but by being vulgarly infected by it. The math here is tender. Almost mushroom-like the toxic line decays the corpse of the body-politic and sprouts from it. Underneath the noise of decay there is silence. The sound of a void somewhere through this fluid-filled cancer, subjectivity fucking an O, another hole, which turns into itself, the Ape/App(s) which is a body of quotes grown from other bodies and chunks and proliferates. I am sad and ecstatic, nothing. Why am I thinking of the garden of Eden? I don’t know what a blurb is and I don’t care if you read this book. It grows in you. Sometimes I am almost revolted but I feel infatuated, which becomes the same thing, guts and bubbles and waste. Now I know it is the same pain, I feel beauty. I am eating and drinking this shit in the storm and it eats me in everything. Light, feel-sight, “the liver a moth” and “at the base of the navel the whole irrational system blows out into tubular microbes, not up.”

—Feng Sun Chen

Aaron Apps works, studies, and lives in Minneapolis, MN. He is the poetry editor for dislocate magazine. He holds degrees in History and English and is currently pursuing an MFA in poetry from the University of Minnesota.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 100 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-092-7