MIRROR MAGIC
by John Sakkis
John Sakkis’ Mirror Magic offers us the riotous in the fullest sense of the word: rife with quick-wit and biting humor, these pages also riot against an ever-crumbling present as it dissolves a future teetering on the cusp of fantastical and apocalyptic; “I tic toc my minutes / NIMBY pansies get butterflies / ‘shadow pollution’ kills birds / so rents go up and over /you laugh at the needles /that stick to your meddling.”\” Bounding through space in Nike shoes, the tragi-comedy of the neoliberal state escalates as “ambition gets complicated” and muddies our horizons. Through Sakkis’ verses we live in a dynamic zone “floating and falling / and floating” in the overlapping absurdity and truth where still he leisurely and militantly demands more. From Vegas, to Californian ecosystems, to UFOs, the moon and beyond, the blossoming of childhood magic collides with adulthood’s brutal realism, daring to hone our critical apparatus and dream harder.
People are Saying:
Irresistible and ebullient as your Saturday plans look midweek, John Sakkis’ Mirror Magic is a reflective and necromantic gathering that gives back what it asks of a day lived both online and off the wall: “please leave/this sweet light/and render me/phosphorescent tubeway splatter genome.” Sakkis’ spunky challenge to the popular poetics of our time (stuffed armor or ardor) make me wonder what Cocteau might be up to in the 21st Century; maybe directing straight-to-VHS skater videos, scanning the Bay’s convex parking bumpers for the myth of the perfect ollie. “’The millennium’ is a confusing term/and you are a headless oracle mumbling/‘this generation shall not pass/directly or indirectly/into the abyss’.” With grime and pop and savvy, these poems’ tricks grind along the silver internet’s omnipresences, a gleaming cube of instruction and wise-assed possibility. Enter here, into Sakkis’ “kinky time warp,” a humid mirror where humor and found magic are the blades for the body to open through.
–Andrew Peterson
Mirror Magic’s poems live simultaneously in uncomfortable realities and joy, gathering snippets of experience as if they were wildflower bouquets for detonating in language like miniature fireworks. Violence and violence collide. Violence and exaltation collide. Sometimes you get burned. Sometimes you get to take a bath. This bad boy is full of life.
–Eleni Sikelianos
John Sakkis’ books include NIKE+, Psychopomp, RAVE ON!, The Islands, and Rude Girl, as well as numerous chapbooks and ephemera. From 2005-2015 he edited BOTH BOTH, a little magazine of poetry. With Angelos Sakkis, he has translated five books by Athenian poet Demosthenes Agrafiotis, including Maribor which won the 2011 Northern California Book Award for Poetry In Translation. He was born and raised and lives in the East Bay Area.