"...What I contrast with this is the perpetuity of energy, which is not quaint. The Indian peoples in the United States have been working on this whole idea of universe where nothing is apportioned or excluded. I mention this because the mind/body is a whole system. If one part of the system doesn't work, you become sick. The seeming tonic to this deadly malaise is psychic interconnection.But now just the opposite is happening. If you look at the newspaper, civilization is rife with separation and fracture......" Interview with Will Alexander, Rain TaxiSunrise in Armageddon is a work of blistering, sibyllic, incensed imagination. Will Alexander's thicketed prose advances lexical ignitions of astounding angle and amplitude. Nathaniel Mackey, author of Splay AnthemRestless. riveting. Unnerving. Wilson Harris, author of Dark JesterOn one level, Alexander is like watching a new plant grow in a speeded-up film, in which all shoots, however obscure, appear to contribute to a veering and uncanny structure. On another level, he may be the first major "outsider artist" in American poetry, in as much as his work bears no relationship whatsoever to anyone in the twentieth-century American canon. Whatever he is, he is a force to reckon with, whose self-propelled soarings evoke Simon Rodia's "Watts Towers" as well as Siberian ecstatics. Clayton Eshelman, author of Conductors of the Pit
About the Author: If it is an oddly futuristic arcana that Will Alexander invokes in his poetry and prose, it is at the same time the most familiar form of defamiliarization. Looking into the drawings that often accompany his texts, those scorings of his "Mime Tornadoes" and "Psychotropic Squalls," often produces the same sort of vertigo felt when looking into deepest space through the most advanced of telescopic technologies. Our sense of being at the edge of the new is tempered by our knowledge that the light reaching us images ancient events. Alexander's science is a fiction that presents us with ancient evenings reflected "in a mirror of scratch paper sonnets" (Stratospheric 33). His is a future anterior that comes to us out of a tradition of African-American re-imagining. Sun Ra devoted a lifetime to telling us of "other planes of there," "other worlds they have not told you of," worlds that seemed placed simultaneously in ancient Egypt and deep in the future. The Art Ensemble of Chicago has built a career around their motto, "Great Black Music, Ancient to the Future." Amiri Baraka's album of poetry and music It's Nation Time billed itself as "Afrikan Visionary Music" and carried cover art in which the ancient inscriptions of black Africa gave onto a futurist dawning of a new day past the pyramids. Each of these artists has contributed to a history of pan-African modernity, an internationalist, African-inflected surrealism that leads directly to Will Alexander's front door. Nielsen, Aldon Lynn "Will Alexander's "Transmundane Specific"" Callaloo - Volume 22, Number 2, Spring 1999, pp. 409-416