Geof Huth reviews Wondermental

“Nico Vassilakis is the best of us, and by "us," I mean the small number of people who create visual poetry and textual poetry as if they are the same thing.

After abandoning New York City (and me) for Illinois, moving to a place a few miles from my great grandmother's hometown, he found himself in the countryside, so he made poetry in various ways, as he did in New York. I love the sound of his voice on the page (at least as it reverberates in my head), so I've made a poem out of those lines, much as he points out the small areas in visual poems of mine that he finds interesting. 

When a word broke in half and

letters started bleeding

A visual bandwidth of jettisoned

letter fragments and receivable 

material

Again we wind up

in a pile of gestures 

Saying more than words

can possibly

So that stopping

becomes the goal

What is it for text to visually encompass

itself. What is a poem but a 

sum of its parts on display

No one chooses to live like this

but we end up this way

Embarrassed by it

Unprepared to slip into nothingness

like this awkward poem 

You stand in front of a mirror

dressed in a lavish array of 

festoonery and all you'll see 

is asymmetry

Otherwise malarkey

Contraband

Arugula

Need I add defenestrate

Please

I said, I love my wife

That is enough

The chaos stops here

No, here

I mean, here

It's too painful to edit anymore

It's time to make an alphabet 

out of twigs

Now that writing has ended there's 

not much to say

People are strange, even on

a playground they'll vie for dominance

The protesters are holding up 

blank signs, but they're 

still getting arrested

Our beauty is in being frail”

—

Geof Huth is a visual poet whose work can be found at https://dbqp.blogspot.com/.

Wondermental by Nico Vassilakis is available now online or at your favorite local bookstore.