THE COMBUSTION CYCLE
by Will Alexander
Will Alexander’s The Combustion Cycle focuses the reader’s attention on civilizations, geographies, and celestial objects ignored or rejected by mainstream world cultures. Not merely a regional articulation but in global resonance, Alexander’s magnum opus aligns regions from Patagonia to the northern polar wastes, to western Africa in an inner technology of burning external to the Occidental machinery with its built-in limits.
The Combustion Cycle erupts from an intuitive seed that coalesces with the grief and grievance of forgotten cultures. Less a sudden lightning-like insight than a protracted seepage that gathers over time into a deluge of language, springing from unknown genetic powers to encounter Alexander’s curious tributaries of the imagination. The Combustion Cycle explores the author’s “protracted lingual voltage.”
People are saying:
“A long-distance runner extraordinaire, Will Alexander parses and devours information, code and arcana lest they parse and devour him, parse and devour us. What but deep seas and distant galaxies would make such a demand his extended soliloquies implicitly ask and overtly answer. These high-toned reflections and imprecations unfold in a march mode almost, an ever insistent rat-a-tat on the rim of a snare, flame and flame’s gnarled ignition. Here wonder and menace meet and reconnoiter, a singular, major addition to an already singular, major body of work.” – Nathaniel Mackey
“Will Alexander, more than any of our other American contemporaries, is the inheritor of an ecstatic surrealism derived from European sources, colored by factual & scientific particulars, & drawing with great intelligence & passion from an international avant-garde & from the negritude writings of Aimé Césaire & others, for whom he acts as a true successor. Now, in The Combustion Cycle, he moves forward, as he always has, as a unique & dazzling spirit, a true American & world master—for our time surely, & just as surely, for the times to come.” – Jerome Rothenberg
“With a bird’s tetrachromatic vision, Will Alexander lights language up with all its possibilities to accommodate a larger vision of the self, cosmic in its capaciousness. No longer are we only allowed the shapes given to us by petty expectations—instead, in The Combustion Cycle (which, for a fuller experience, I recommend reading with an excellent dictionary by your side), each word opens to an incredible new way of seeing and being in the deep and many-dimensioned universe itself. Alexander finds hope for a powerfully beautiful now, simultaneous with all our long histories and our potential futures.” – Marcella Durand
“Will Alexander’s The Combustion Cycle stands as a towering monument to the imagination. Each of its three major phases is narrated by a shapeshifting first-person voice roving through landscapes of cosmic scale. Flying ‘in advance of neurological infinity,’ Alexander’s traveling eye concatenates diverse facts of science and history into dazzling kaleidoscopic patterns. Over these lines hover the spirits of Aimé Césaire, Erasmus Darwin, and the compilers of vast Renaissance compendia. But the metaphysical weight of this tome will bend spacetime around it. The first and best epic of the Anthropocene has arrived.” – Andrew Joron
“Entheogenic, ecstatic, shapeshifting—this is the poetry Plato warned us about. In Alexander’s incantatory cycle, the transcorporeal, explosive &ldsuo;I’ cohabits with planets and plants, birds and sharks, weather and fire. Every line is a psychic and physical threshold. Each syllable traverses multiple alphabets. Alexander’s poems piece together galvanic epiphanies into materials for a decolonized generation starship. “Embarkation is resistance.” To read is to be propelled. – Joshua Schuster
Will Alexander is by far the most original poet working in the United States today. A major force in the dissemination of Surrealism, there is absolutely no one who sounds like Alexander and he, most emphatically, sounds like no one else.” – Justin Desmangles
About the author:
Poet, essayist, novelist, short fiction writer, playwright, aphorist, visual artist, pianist, who has written close to 40 books in the above-mentioned genres, Will Alexander is the poet-in-residence at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Foundation in Venice California. He currently lives in Los Angeles.