SOFT WATER, John Coletti

40 pages from one of our best--these poems, as to be expected with Coletti's work, provide a laser scalpel to events and observations personal, impersonal, and absurd, rearranging and collaging altered realities with mystifying, clarifying, and beguiling results. These poems, in their psychedelically lovely and distressing structures, bring a sense of insane comfort. They read comfortingly like discovering an old friend hanging out in the garage at a house party, while the music and laughter continues on with its ripple just a sheet of drywall away. I don't know, Schuyler on ketamine--sounds crass, but give it a go. In time you will understand these uncommon crystals as more real than real experience.

John Coletti is the author of Soft Water (Spiral Editions, 2024), Attachment Simply (Eternal Sections, 2023), Peppermint Oil (PUSH, 2020), Deep Code (City Lights, 2014), Mum Halo (Rust Buckle Books, 2010), Same Enemy Rainbow (fewer & further 2008), and Physical Kind (Yo-Yo-Labs 2005). With Anselm Berrigan, he is the author of Skasers (Flowers & Cream, 2012).

Soft Water, John Coletti. $14, plus shipping. 44p, 8.5" x 7", bound with staples.

Covers set in Optima and printed on a 1961 Vandercook III proof press in “Lawrence, Kansas” with French Royal Blue cardstock. Insides laser duplicated on French heavyweight text paper in “Kingston, New York.” Printed, assembled, and bound in both “Lawrence, Kansas” and “Kingston, New York,” the respective unceded and occupied lands of the Kaw, Kickapoo, and Osage tribes and the Haudenosaunee, Mohican, Munsee Lenape, and Schaghitcoke tribes. First printing, edition of 125. Design by Ryan Skrabalak with assistance from The Aliens.