Dog with incisors that chip when cracking a chicken bone; dog whose bark is a whinny squeezed from the throat of a black mare. These avenues, Tujunga, Lankershim, are vast and ugly; gas stations are palaces, and stucco is the preferred coating over wall fungus, cockroaches, and pipes funneling excreta and tears into the sea where misery is rejuvenated. But my dog trails after me on the sidewalk; and the liquor store awning, the park where autumn takes up residence and rusts the swings are where he marks off his territory with urine that is not saccharine like that of a grandmother, but scalding as water boiling in a luncheonette’s stainless steel pot. And so I write, trying to avoid him: the trot and subverting backtrack from cars at intersections. I don’t want to be that dog in the Valley where neon throbs at dusk, where the evening star burns, but not for this man who sits alone, dog curled at his slippers, hind paw twitching from the unbridled gallop of a nightmare.
ISBN 1-59661-099-9
73 pages/$9
Like a red wind sirocco from a Raymond Chandler story, Anthony Seidman’s poems surround
your body and your senses. The words are both abrasive and dark, the way the night is
dark and a desert wind is like sandpaper on your skin. These prose poems are like an
Under the Volcano in verse but they are not a simple noir or the compelling
ravings of a drunk poet of lost souls. You can feel the tension, the warring factors
at work in these finely wrought poems. This is the raw stuff of creation wedded with
loss, the primal and the ineffable, finding form in a neon lighted cantina on the edge
of the writer’s mind.
—Alan Catlin
“Explosive” is one way to describe Combustions, Anthony Seidman’s raucous book
of prose poems. “Brazen is another, as he, “like a fin slicing water toward trawled
dolphin,” travels through the “faucet in a marble bathroom,” then emerges: “…driving
home, I sweat from netting in an innuendo uttered that morning from parking attendant
or tourist, a code which, after originally sinking in the swamp of consciousness, has
surfaced, its skin brackish and green.” These poems will submerge you, rattle you—even
taste you, like a reef shark trolling for an easy meal. You can’t surf these poems.
They are too unpredictable. Diving’s the only way to go, down below the dangerous
reef itself. Seidman’s imagery ranges from the top of the brain (“They taste of autumn,
sharply copper-like”) to the depths of the psyche (“With syllables he heard the falling
of cherry blossoms in a temple atrium in that region where the farmers had already stored
the rice.”) Strap yourself in.
—Alan Britt
Once you start to read these poems, you will not stop. You’ll find yourself immersed
in the presence of an extraordinary interior dialogue between something you feel you
know—but have somehow forgotten—and something you think you know but which instead
turns out to be unknown. Words will no longer seem to adhere to their inherited
interpretations, their imposed meanings. Seidman’s lush voice allows each the freedom
to roam into the shape of a reality that best helps him solve his singular reality.
Just like the light one peels from an onion, it is the clarity of his depth that
brightens our short visit.
—Paul B. Roth,
Editor and Publisher, The Bitter Oleander Press
Anthony Seidman is the author of Where Thirsts Intersect (2006), published by The Bitter Oleander Press. Some of Seidman’s recent publications include poems and translations in The Bitter Oleander, Skidrow Penthouse, Iodine, Iron Horse Literary Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Beyond Baroque, La Prensa from Managua, Nicaragua, and La Jornada, from Mexico City. He lives in Los Angeles with his family.