Franco Cortese, of faulthers
Emops, piems, and pomes—oh my! From Niagara-based poet Franco Cortese comes of faulthers, a beautifully rich and impressive set of formal poetic experiments that spins language delightfully on its axis and sends it falling, failing, flailing into the abyss. The work features a wide variety of poetic forms and styles, including multilingual lipogrammatic palindromes, line-unit anagrams, amputranslations—everything including the kitschen sink. We’re not sure exactly what this is, but it hits us right in the schfeels.
This chapbook is printed on white paper with cardstock cover lovingly designed and (painstakingly!) typeset by Dani Spinosa. Each copy is bound with a translucent ribbon sealed with wax—cause we like breaking shit and we like to do it fancy.
Sample Poem
måkëššéncē
Self: What elsse. A tourist truth. Essence’s excuse. Every being really a becoming and every thee secretly a three in disguise like dikes undone and water unwalled yet skyborne and salted besides, and what’s more becoming before my verity eyes in an unseemly light awash in night behind every blink and witless inner wink and hints of sky fire flints fine enough to seem and sign besides. A gape a ghasp a gash begutted anyou into n’ aplueu to stitch the carnvas of self, chaste with stain and taint of tinted time left unchecked to rotanew and duly undo while Zeus says refuse, Promethean chaingangs notwithstanding,deliberating the shape of our shoreless shadows in the wings while Icarus is already in flight, suddenly ablush at crimson beginnings just beyond the rim and ashamed that he can’t remember the start, so fuck the state of prior art, the blessed prime blunder and fatherless falter, the initial initials no numbers to follow, a tribute to overturned overtured ovaries overeasy around the ashes of firebirds that failed to fly at last, aghast but for asecond, as though that makes a differance. Self an else an orbit round itself like bits ormits or cyclic hips, a weirdly wired weary sphere mirrored inside and sumhow alight at night in sightmareish sun and sign sublime. A slick usurpant spillinter of itself. A thing so ghast as to think. A thing of dawns in the dark and liquilight fire within its vairy hone hinner retire. A makeshift echo and righteous deluge of beautiful clash upon the watery night inside and out, for form is font two, meaning a matter of letters as well. Redsalt cleave of dawn, the sun, a fothers ghost offcenter, offenter, offender, the mother, who sent her, wherehamhigh, meatcrest crux deluxe, esse luxus relictus. We are each our own fathers from the second second on, tinkled pink through time, forned intwo form from dark heartless drums and the forking of our mums, from roads and handled tools, the foregotten fools of our faltered fathers, like godless good or some old dogs tricks and sacred stolen sticks. Essence cursed again, and in cursive too