TRUE ACCOUNT OF TALKING TO THE 7 IN SUNNYSIDE
by Paolo Javier
Paolo Javier is a writer of potentiality and exploration, knowing that the essence of poesis may arrive from variegated and unexpected sources, such as diaries, dreams, lists, conversation, photographs, articles, blogs, DMs, music lyrics, instructions, comics, maps, film dialogue, interviews, slang, paranormal accounts, film theory, birthday cards, letters, “and other people’s poetry–to name a few.” Javier describes his method as “assemblage.” In this exciting and incendiary new collection, the poet constitutes an inventive space on the page where the quotidian mingles with the sublime. Here outlaw archiving meets postmodern bricolage, disjointedly mapping disorientating experience in a way yielding flashes of unexpected clarity through a strong sense of place. It is readable as verse, yet more. It is now.
People are paying attention! Javier has received glowing press coverage in The New Yorker, Publishers Weekly, and The Comics Journal. Critics lavishly compare him to luminaries such as bpNichols, Lynda Barry, and Grant Morrison. His proclivity for comics also aligns him with poet-illustrators Bianca Stone and Sommer Browning. Language and imagery swirl around each other and synthesize in surprising and evolving fashion. Maybe it will take the form of an "occult diary" of Hosni Mubarak as he attempts to invoke the ancient terror of Cthulhu. Some poems seem to run low on toner, others switch modes and fonts as they swerve around personal and political themes. This eclectic work goes all over the place yet returns consistently to the centrality of perception. Nobody else looks at the world like Paolo Javier, aka "the Leche Flâneur," and his book will take you on a ride unlike any other. Bring it with you for conversational company on the 7 to Sunnyside, or everywhere.
People Are Saying:
Paolo Javier's writing in this volume condenses as a form of speed that questions creative fatigue. There exists kinetics of homo-sapiens sapiens as dazzling encounter with itself not slowly stilled within projected heresy but understanding the stilled tautology within its infirmed psychic circumference. It understands random fragmentation that continues rising from consciousness as curious arteries of light. Not unlike a melodic inner scale akin it partakes of a form of evanescent aurality that blinds and implies by this blinding a form of artistic spinning not simply as loquaciousness but as positive infection. This being endemic verbal exploration that slowly spreads as slow motion seething.
–Will Alexander
Paolo Javier’s poems are magic carpets of extravagant textures (visual and verbal). Javier combines an engagement with the social politics of the local with a commitment to aesthetic freedom that exultantly borders on abandon (a band’s dome): a “communard pulveriz[ing] rapaciousness.” Onwards!
–Charles Bernstein
You are holding this book, reading this blurb. You want to know what someone else thinks. Well, it’s the best poetry I have read in a really long time, period. Yes, there is “best poetry,” the kind that will never make it into the anthologies and will never tic the boxes on the checklist and that’s why it’s so good—can’t be contained, won’t be explained, exists in the regions where language is so material, furious, and loving that it won’t submit to exposition. But I’ll try to inventory its intensities. Here vibrates the everything, humming inside impeccably crafted frames: images, sounds, languages, sense, another sense, pop culture, literariness, travel, sitting still, playfulness, indictment, and another indictment that soars so far above complaint that you didn’t even notice it. So, please stop reading this and start reading the insides which for me was like writing/righting my life. If life is a precarious boat ride on topsy-turvy, shared seas, then True Account of Talking to the 7 in Sunnyside is Paolo Javier’s invitation to wild steadiness. Accept it! Thank you, Paolo!
–Jill Magi
I was instantly drawn in by Paolo Javier’s aesthetic and boundary crossing. Javier intimately understands the permeability of boundaries and categories as a person born in the Philippines and having homes in several countries before settling in Queens and as a multidisciplinary artist.
–Sommer Browning
This book is the most on a name with the past for the future. We find ourselves in the loss of translation, as a posthuman ancestor pattern woven into an at least thirty thousand year aspect from the ground— face— interface—inner face—inter face — inner phase— inter phase—inter faze— inner faze—Paolo Javier is knocking on everyone's door. Is there only pain and hatred and misery? Alienation and disconnection? Salve here, Karaoke? In this book we move toward Abya Yala with Javier practicing Oliveros' deep listening across dimensions. We listen to the waves, and see that it is all freedom, as Hendrix said of his own sounds. We search for the Earth and neutralize the super robots that cause us problems. And we find the Seminole cannibal giant Esti Capcaki on our side and strong. Javier fulfills Borges' promise of building on the "anterior to the prophecies and the pyramids." There are so many dream powers here that he knows how to encounter. He is a waterman in the medinas of our cities in the future: "My heart is a golden dome in Marrakesh". C2D and so much life, even as ghosts: "My heart is actually many hearts in one, which makes it so hard to choke..." "my heart is the place to start, when things fall apart, my heart is improving." Even the foundation knows that the keys have gone—CIFO, aka Catalog of Interface features and options—, and this is the answer to all of it: “el medio es una emocion” (like Panamá)... “el medio es disconnocer” “por los sentimos che”. And as I understand it, the mud is important. Odin the wanderer, lifting and erasing obstacles. To make night bloom: "immediate return of Shatemuc & Lenapehoking/to the Lenni-Lenape" "STOP/yr anti-/Asian/hate" "Little lettrist isthmus muse". "what to do/with all of this/emergent/joy", Javier has made in this, an heroic and beautiful book.
–Roberto Harrison
About the Author:
The former Queens Borough Poet Laureate (2010-2014), Paolo Javier was born in the Philippines and grew up in Las Piñas, Metro Manila. The recipient of a 2021 Rauschenberg Foundation Artist Grant, he was a featured artist in Greater NY 2015 and Queens International 2018: Volumes. He has produced three albums of sound poetry with Listening Center (David Mason) and collaborated again recently with filmmaker/poet Lynne Sachs on SWERVE, a short film that premiered at BAM Cinemafest. He is the author of five previous full-length books and lives with his family in Jackson Heights, NYC.