Jason Heroux’s The Sea Never Drowns (2007)

Over the next few weeks or months, I will post all my reviews (“Tom’s Celebrations”) that appeared in Redactions: Poetry, Poetics, & Prose (formerly Redactions: Poetry & Poetics) up to and including issue 12. After that, my reviews appeared here (The Line Break) before appearing in the journal. This review first appeared in issue 11, which was published circa January 2009.

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If you ever saw Sugar Ray Leonard with his smile and soft demeanor, you’d think what a gentle man he is. But then if you saw him dance and punch in the boxing ring, well, you’d be impressed at his beauty, speed, and power. Jason Heroux’s poems in The Sea Never Drowns (sunnyoutside) are like Sugar Ray. They seem simple and at ease, for the most part, but there is an accretion of images and thoughts in each poem that culminate in strong ends. It’s like a solid right jab of an ending. It’s really as if the poem doesn’t happen until after the last line, when the punch is felt, when

   the trees only blossom
   when no one is watching  	         
                                          (“Sunday in San Pietro Infine,” ll 17-18)

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Heroux, Jason. The Sea Never Drowns. Buffalo, NY: sunnyoutside, 2007.//

The Line Break 2012 in Review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 40,372 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 9 Film Festivals

Click here to see the complete report.

Redactions: Poetry, Poetics, & Prose 2012 Pushcart Prize Nominations

Redactions: Poetry, Poetics, & Prose has made its nominations for the 2012 Pushcart Prize, and this year for the first time we have nominated a fiction piece and a creative non-fiction piece. The nominees in the order of appearance in issue 15 are:

1. Nathan E. White, “Assignment” (poem), pages 6-7.
2. Derek Annis, “This Time of Year” (poem), page 11.
3. Thom Caraway, “Language Acquisition” (poem), page 19.
4. Elise Gregory, “Benevolent Me” (poem), page 19.
5. Sarah Cedeño, “Fledgling” (fiction), pages 61-66.
6. Silas Hansen, “The Masculinity Test” (creative non-fiction), pages 67-68.

To read these poems, stories, and more, order a copy of issue 15 from here: http://www.etsy.com/shop/redactionspoetry.

You can also read the Pushcart Prize nominated poems here: http://www.redactions.com/pushcart-poems.asp.

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Holmes’ Hattiesburg Hideaway

There ain’t much to this post. It’s just a short video of my new apartment so my family can see what happening. Non-family members can also watch.

This video has been updated. It’s the same video, but the video and audio are now aligned and the video quality is better.

Updated 8-21-12.//

Paintings from the 1990s

I have wanted to scan these water color paintings for quite some time before the color faded even more. I finally did it, though the colors faded. I’ve tried to touch up the color in a few paintings. These are are all water colors on 8.5″ x 11.7″ paper. You can click each image to see it bigger, and I would suggest doing that, too.

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The Beginning of Time. Circa 1997.

I painted this based on an experience I once had in 1989, where for a moment, the briefest moment I’ve experienced, I could see the beginning of time. I think this picture is of some time before inflation or before 10^-42 seconds. The following day I performed a similar meditation, but that time I experienced the breadth of the universe. I reached out my hand as far as I could into infinity and then I scratched the back of head, which scared the hell out of me and immediately woke me from my meditation.

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Slain Bison. Circa 1997-99.

This is my attempt at Paleolithic cave art. I had to photoshop in the arrow because it was barely visible. It had faded over time. Below is supposed to be a puddle of blood with a stream of it in the lower right of the puddle. And there is also an udder in the bison’s belly. The spear enters from the top of the bison which is parallel to the stiffened tail. The spear exits the bison in the belly at the black gash mark. The arrow is bloody red. This image is really sexual on a Jungian level.

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The Mouth of Language. Circa 1997.

The colors have faded here. The tongue should be redder. This painting could also be titled “Double Vagina Dentata.”

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The Rose Triptych. Circa 1995.

This a series about the life and death of a rose or possible states of a rose. This was highly symbolic on a personal level and very Jungian, but not as Jungian as the vagina dentata or the slain bison. I think the triptych speaks for itself.

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