On Neil Flory’s locust blindfold stompchant rain (Arteidolia Press, 2026)
Joshua Martin
(nothin said)
lockedtrunk/ any
every
language flickering floodstage blindfold searing
gelatinous
conceivable/
over plus
Neil Flory takes language to the edge and then pushes it over, crashing down, words splitting into shards and fragments which are reassembled to create the poems that make up locust blindfold stompchant rain, his latest collection released by Arteidolia Press. This is no ordinary assembly, instead Flory shakes and jumbles his broken pieces and recreates language, pulverizing it, smashing words, symbols, phrases, and punctuation together into something entirely unique.
ALASDelphi>basi n’s/motor
METHINKS thetemp.est nightofSP
/ent evi/dent chancely prince>ss>ly Persephone
Flory’s work requires the reader to remain active; his wonderfully dense concoctions forcing us to read closely so as to decipher the gloriously complicated montage-like poems he has created for us to joyfully sink our intellectual teeth into. These pieces soar, swirl, confuse (in the best possible sense!), cajole, misdirect, and flow wildly across the page. There is no sense of grounding here, instead Flory wants us to strap in and hang on for the ride.
variablesCON/VOKE of variegrated
VOXviscerality planked &HALT
Phrases and words are both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. We can recognize the language and sometimes we can understand it, though oftentimes we don’t even care to because the verbal dexterity, the jarring juxtapositions, the mash-ups, and clever portmanteaus enthrall us. Neil Flory’s poetics is enthralling! A spattering, crowded, endlessly inventive mélange.
his FreeJazz
doublequartet EXPLODING]/(/(/[/[/(
in brasscharging dissona
ncefre[renzy[(/([(
Flory is also a composer and musician and locust blindfold stompchant rain has the quality of musique concrete or free jazz: the polyrhythmic, atonal, cubist style of a Cecil Taylor rendered onto the page. And it’s just as jarring and just as fascinating and demanding and musical. One poem is appropriately titled “listening to Ornette Coleman” and it adequately captures the feel of listening to the great jazz innovator. Flory’s words carry our consciousness along raging rapids of furiously inventive linguistic visions. Flory’s work does what all great experimental work should do: makes us read, see, think, and hopefully understand differently.
(or just how many
frontloaded clusterchords can you
craminto craminto cram 1feeble slimy
silver sli
ver of time anyw
ay just1 )
Language is not static but dynamic. Words are free and malleable. The endless combinations and collisions both reduce language to its most primitive state but also reveal all its complexities and possibilities. Poetics is not a dead form for Flory nor is language. It lives and breathes and transmogrifies relentlessly. Poetry, for Flory, is an art still capable of surprise, still seeking another way, another form. This book demands that its reader surrender to it. This book wants an active reader, someone who doesn’t require sense, logic, easy answers, or other traditional literary forms to spoon feed them more cliched poetics. The ideal reader of locust blindfold stompchant rain will thrive on its convulsions, disruptions, rhythms, and deconstructions.
haggard convulsiontooth jackhammer. concluding paragraph
&all proven theses tossed in a cementmixer.
Flory’s works offers the reader something other than the bland mediocrity and conformity that contemporary literary (all!) culture tries to shove down our throats. locust blindfold stompchant rain gives our eyes, ears, and brains that rarest of things: difficult, innovative, playful, stimulating, provocative work that demands we read and think differently and that’s a beautiful thing!
locust blindfold stompchat rain can be ordered here from Arteidolia Press.