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by Joseph M. Hess (Author)
Into the Ancient, presents America in an array of 'endgame' narratives erupting out of conventional dying metaphors: collages of nostalgia entangled with post-modern decollage ("Borrowed Browns"), a natural world trapped inside a devil's unsexy bargain ("Curve Wind"), a pornography adjacent to love and loss ("Flesh Cartography," "Splendor"), super models enrapturing on billboards above Jehovah Witness foot traffic ("Low Ghosts in Brooklyn"). Often, the poems present the quotidian turning provocative: a soldier longingly wandering a convenient store before a mission flight ("Parallax"); individual agency wrestling with classical, gendered mythologies ("Pandora and Orpheus," "Spotting Odysseus"). The poems wade in a textured poetics of allusion, imagery and metaphor trying to decipher the ever-evolving field of contact between enduring consciousness and fleeting awareness, between normative cultural expectations and personal revelation; they twist away from traditional storylines to strategically work out-of-synch, contrapuntally, towards a lucid, emotiveness.
