Alphabet Noise
Thomas Townsley
2025
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“Exuberant, amphibian and phantasmagoric!”
The sixth full length collection of poems from Thomas Townsley is an imaginative tour de force. “Do you seek le mot au jus?” “Don’t read too much into the falling apple blossoms.” “They say a man who breaks forms is often broken by them.” “The instructions were never quite right never quite clear...” “(The narrator raises an eyebrow and offers the reader a spoon.)” “But enough mimesis.” The poems in Alphabet Noise push language to a breaking point, beyond which it is possible to glimpse...what exactly? “The radio hisses.” “The reader is reminded that ‘some slippage is inevitable.’”
Praise for Alphabet Noise:
Alphabet Noise is an immersive experience, a croquembouche of crunchy predicates and polysemous jouissance. A wang dang doodle. A dynamo of “mad sleeping alphabets” galvanized by the noise of construction. Sparks flying. The blinding light of a welder creating a chassis of vocable transport. This is the noise of the poet as maker, the poet as innovator and explorer. The language is exuberant, amphibian and phantasmagoric. Intellect is endowed with puckish autonomy, a verbal acrobatics and jubilant excess which functions as an antidote against the toxins of those who would try to control and undermine the true merit of words, which is yet to be fully realized. This is the factory. This is the place where things get made. Hyper-objects. Philosophies. Le paradoxe de Mallarmé. “In the lit Palace of Nothing there are only voices.”
-John Olson
Author of numerous books of poetry and prose poetry and recipient of The Stranger’s 2004 Literature Genius Award. His seventh novel, Unfinished World, is forthcoming from Quale Press.
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Famous Last Words #31 (10/15/2022)
Face down in poetry-schemes awaiting the swoon of whispers
I feel these albatross sentences becoming ever more centrifugal
The words emerge a new skin forgotten etymologies dream fulcrums
Irregular verbs drunk in cars clouds of white numbers and myths in sleep’s clothing
Why this devotion to outcast echoes? The passions of men come to nothing
The mirror’s black holes distance and time scraping at the glass
Bodies aching to remember love’s missing pages The original language is a map
of impermanence the first metaphor a dead angel a priori
Chthonic deities practice sleight of hand in their dark towers and each human skull’s
a labyrinth of signs Each stammering poem explodes perpetually into the uncreated
the fundamental silence Each single word burns the incense of sun-spent eternity
What little we know is memory a falling star and nothing else will follow
So how was your summer? Were we crazy-drunk and wrecked by music?
Did the symbols speak their pluralities? Did we dare the thunder to erase our names?
Face down in poetry-schemes awaiting the swoon of whispers
I feel these albatross sentences becoming ever more centrifugal
The words emerge a new skin forgotten etymologies dream fulcrums
Irregular verbs drunk in cars clouds of white numbers and myths in sleep’s clothing
Why this devotion to outcast echoes? The passions of men come to nothing
The mirror’s black holes distance and time scraping at the glass
Bodies aching to remember love’s missing pages The original language is a map
of impermanence the first metaphor a dead angel a priori
Chthonic deities practice sleight of hand in their dark towers and each human skull’s
a labyrinth of signs Each stammering poem explodes perpetually into the uncreated
the fundamental silence Each single word burns the incense of sun-spent eternity
What little we know is memory a falling star and nothing else will follow
So how was your summer? Were we crazy-drunk and wrecked by music?
Did the symbols speak their pluralities? Did we dare the thunder to erase our names?
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