UNDERBELLIES OF THE ANCIENT CUBE TRICK, Ricky Salmonhunter

"makes perfect weather

style guide: eat monsters
and it wonders
ashram
on a repeat phrase
how to repeat or invent
a new wishbone facsimile
with purpose, intention—

these are the issues of the day
and how it makes no sense
to gather
barbecue twigs in one whole
party of comrades
and smile, laugh, hug,"

"This collection composed itself in a flash over long years. It is at once old and new; its words are unspecial and in no particular order. One presence governs—water—but underneath, as an aquifer, to make shapes and recompose them in tessellation."

Underbellies is a "meaning-making" "exercise," under the guise of the tension between language arresting experience in the fluency of itself, and the lyric's reflexive habit to archive the thing in total. Things cannot be said precisely, and so we are presented with the tittering mantic mathematics of the kaleidoscope of happening--Freud's subtitular "fundamental rule" of free association. Poems are deeper than words; what is the depth beyond the limiting architecture of syntax, of dis/association, of meaning?

Ricky Salmonhunter is the poet-persona of Michael Watkins, who studies poetics and biosemiotics as a PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania, which stands on Lenape territory. In 2022, he published a collection of mock-pastoral poems titled PASTORALLLL.

$13, plus shipping. 4.25" x 14", 44 pages, heavy-duty stapled, covers printed on Mohawk neon lemon cardstock, copy printed on French heavyweight text paper. First edition of 75 copies. Set in BT Grotesk Spiral and designed by The Aliens. Ships June 5th.