From the Lost Land (I-XII) by André Spears

In 1974, Jacques Derrida published an extraordinary book titled Glas. It is divided into two columns, the left one devoted to commentary on Hegel, the right one to the work of Jean Genet. Quotations from countless texts are interspersed throughout. There is nothing in the history of philosophy like it. Nor is there anything in American poetry that comes as close to Glas in its formal proceeding as André Spears’ mindboggling From the Lost Land (I-XII). (The echoing fact is fitting, given that Spears studied with Derrida in NYC throughout the 1990s.) A thrillingly wild, epic poem that seems written by Charles Olson on ayahuasca takes up one side of the page; a serial Wunderkammer of mesmerizing quotations that seems compiled by John Bartlett on mushrooms takes up the other. The formal difference between Spears’ masterwork and that of his former teacher is that while Derrida’s proceeds in the form of static, facing columns, each canto of Spears’ epic transposes the right/left modality, so that the sense, as the book unfolds, is of the poem and its shadowing quotations intertwined round the other like spiraling helices. The conception is stunning in its ambition. There are very few works in American poetry that approach the intertextual energies and breadth of learning on display by Spears. Off the radar screens of the poetry trading floors by his own choice, now in late career, he is one of the most singular poets at work in the English language.

— Kent Johnson

“Men dead and white abounding, social perspectives out of key with culturally mixed societies, heroes strutting their toxic masculinity—the classical epic is not exactly a go-to genre for contemporary writers or readers, nor, for similar reasons, have the 20th century re-dos of William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, or Charles Olson found favor. So much to clean up, so much to apologize for! But André Spears does not clean up or apologize; in From the Lost Land (I–XII), he blows the genre out of its wine-dark sea. Equal parts Star Wars, On the Road, Deleuzean war machine, and surrealist delirium, this poem-ever-in-progress is literature on steroids, philosophy on acid. It is scandalous, funny, erudite, and endlessly generative. It is an epic without organs.”

—Miriam Nichols

André Spears is the director of the Maud / Olson Library in Gloucester (MA) and a senior editor of the recently archived website Dispatches from the Poetry Wars. His previous book, XIII: Ship of State, excerpted from a Tarot-based work-in-progress set on the lost continent of Mu, was published by Dispatches Editions (2019), which concurrently posted a digital edition of Xo: A Tale for the New Atlantis; the e-book is available as a free download from the Dispatches website. In conjunction with Xo, BlazeVox is also publishing Shrinkrap: Litany in Quadrophony and From the Lost Land (I – XII).

Book Information:

· Paperback: 114 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-372-0