TRANSIENCE
Negotiations with grace, or
syllables each to next placed
in retort, or a caress
susceptive to complex
denials, or endless
efforts to put a stop
to time that yet end
Sans
G. L. Ford
May 2017
These gorgeous poems emerge like songs from the flicker between slides...
Jacqueline Waters
Sans is an extended meditation on the components of personal and cultural memory, as seen from within a state of their decay. It is G.L. Ford’s first full-length collection of poems.
About the Author
G. L. Ford was a founding member of the Ugly Duckling Presse collective and a founding editor of 6×6. His poems have appeared in The Brooklyn Review and LVNG, among others. Chapbooks of his work have been published by UDP and Cy Gist Press. He resides in Harlem.
Praise
Can you be patient with your memories? I mean, is there time enough? You can push one away for years, only to find, when you’re ready for it, that it’s lost its presence, fading into a denatured place “in which world and flesh / pull taut against each other / enough to allow / erosion.” In this sharp, haunting sequence of poems I feel like G. L. Ford is charting memory’s insistent dwindling, “like an alphabet / shedding letters,” marked throughout by dispatches from Gilgamesh’s half-beast best friend, who might find our present world “itself a judgment / on our faltering and / bestial sympathies, or not / bestial enough.” Ford’s got a wonderful, decisive ear and a deft touch. These gorgeous poems emerge like songs from the flicker between slides in the old slideshow.
Jacqueline Waters
In the News
Links
Other UDP titles from G. L. Ford here
Landscape of Fire and Music Review
Landscape of Fire and Music Review on LitNav
Publication Details
ISBN: 978-1-937027-93-3
Trade Paperback
Perfect-bound. 64 pp, 4.25 x 7.5 in
Publication Date: May 01 2017
Distribution: Asterism Books (US)