Diatribal Writes of Passage in a World of Wintertextuality: Poems on Language, Media, and Life (But Not as We Know It)

Diatribal Writes of Passage in a World of Wintertextuality: Poems on Language, Media, and Life (But Not as We Know It)

by Lance Strate

Language in Action Series

The second poetry collection by Lance Strate, this volume brings together an eclectic mix of poems that address the themes of language, communication, media, technology, and poetry itself, etc.

A bold and radiant journey into a jigsaw universe, Strate’s poems reveal a redemptive self-awareness, a playful exuberance with the twists and turns of the whirling worlds of language and imagery, feeling and experience.

–T.C McLuhan, author and filmmaker

Significant, casually formal, sly, engaging, passionately inexact, curious, playful, and utterly readable: the magic in Lance Strate’s poems is in the profound and humble poetic intelligence that guides them. With it he creates a charged silence in the gaps between the words where their consensual meanings, along with the reader, pass through the universe of things thus far unsaid–the ever-present substance of what life feels like–before they reach the next word on the other side.

–Chuck Wachtel, poet, novelist, Pen/Ernest Hemingway Citation recipient

Lance Strate’s wordplay unleashes a tumbling and a turning of phonemes and phrases skipping consciousness like stones on a lake. This is a delightful collection resonant with sound and rhythmic flourishes. The poet’s jesters that “…the meaning of meaning is meaning… a leaning” then immediately goes about his craft pitting story against a light-hearted dance with language.

–Lillian Allen, internationally acclaimed poet and Professor of Creative Writing, Ontario College of Art and Design University

Lance Strate’s clever, pithy, and logocentric poetry at once celebrates language and manifests itself as performance art. Poems with titles such as “essays,” “prose,” and “these words”—unlike the verbiage described in “up in smoke” becoming “disappeared for all time”—will endure. Why? Because, for example, the science fiction poem “ode on a geekian urn” poses the definitive question of our brave new science fiction virus-sodden world: “thank goodness the Force was with us then is it with us now?” The answer: emphatically yes. We have Strate’s luminous poetic illocutionary force to accompany us and light our way during dark times.

–Marleen Barr, novelist, literary critic, and Pilgrim Award recipient

Lance Strate has created a joyous maelstrom of cultural symbolism, timeless mystery, and linguistic dance. His style is both childlike and profound… as if Mother Goose had a son with Lewis Carroll raised by Camille Paglia and Kurt Vonnegut and given a mission to expand the boundaries of perspective and wonder. Treat yourself to insightful, poetic lunacy of the highest order.

–Stephen Roxborough, internationally acclaimed poet, co-founder of Burning Word poetry festival, and Head Poet for Madrona Center on Guernes Island

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2020. 186 pp. ISBN 1970164026. 6 x 0.4 x 9 inches.