THIEF OF HEARTS
by Maxwell Owen Clark
Maxwell Owen Clark’s Thief of Hearts breaks barriers of both traditional and experimental poetry. In
“order to sub-tain ‘the’ proper
moenumtin of thoht. The
uthoragon must ember
to fo.rget,nod,to exdpend
witout reserve.”
Clark’s initial foray breaks with the expectation of one kind of meaning focused on visual
{opened unto yet )
to slow reading to an assured pace of comprehension. If you’re willing to read at his pace.
Toward the middle the book transitions from predominantly visual to semantic. By the end, although nothing has ever been made quite clear, the reader knows they are in a fully semantic frame that leads the reader to explore the roots of language.
Using different fonts and sizes, symbols, fragmented text, and his own forms of erasure Clark’s musicality and chaotic rhythm spark and prevail. Even in sections where the text can be read more prosaically, disruptions dominate Clark’s poetry, taking shape in the combination of words, letters, in size, and even other languages.
Thief of Hearts is a truly innovative and exciting work that shows the delicate control, and inevitable disruption challenge the reader to defy the definitions that have been given to poetry, alphabets, and even space on the page.
People are saying:
“After two cursory readings and one careful perusal, I emerge from what began as a specularly exciting trainwreck between Apollinaire’s calligrammes and the giant font-age possibilities of modern word processing, which, in the course of its 72 sections, often startled me and again moved me in all the wonderfully exciting ways that poetry can play with the difficult beyond those Reginald Shepherd tamed in his 2008 essay ‘On Difficulty in Poetry’ (lexical, syntactical, semantic, formal, and modal . . .) but which is simply hard to explain. The movement back and forth between the familiar and the unfamiliar that the text sets up is why I liked this book so much. I want to quote gobs of it: ‘Obsidian razors gut the empty shell of will and grace of a docile child.terminal insomnia. Cherubim piss acid,’ and ‘Even even the the hyenas hyenas,’ ‘slumber slumber.’ It’s quite exciting to see the violence-of- the-letter performed with such energy on the page. But you can’t quote it all, so all you can do is read it again—and again.”
– Samuel R. Delany
“Is there a love-language, a voluptuary’s lexicon, for the human sensorium under erasure in the obscene collapse of the capitalist Anthropocene? Is there a way to dis/articulate/experience oneself as continuum between the grinding planes of global erosion and luxuriant proliferation? Is there outpouring, semantic/sonic/scenic/effluvial, to represent, embody, perform the alpha and omega of sensate and affective life as we know it becoming life as we hope to never have to know it? If so, it’s to be found here, in the Thief of Hearts, swirling among orgiastic vortices of
[a] culling of aroundness. Vents of/
eroticism fan out ALONG ossatures of feeling
Suspend all expectations and hang on for ‘dear’ ‘life’ through the sublime, ‘raving mayhem.’”
– Maria Damon
“Maxwell Clark’s Thief of Hearts is a masterpiece of schizofuturism. Bursting lyric seams with textual and alphabetic jouissance, Clark’s ‘fractal infinities’ are often funny and always exhilarating.”
– Charles Bernstein