A couple of days ago I wrote about our forthcoming duo of horror, poetry and good medicine: Dead to Rights and Dead Edit Redo.
Here’s a little more to whet your appetite with a blurb for the novella: Dead Edit Redo
“Professor and best-selling poet Alain C. Dexter leaps to his death at Valletta Falls, moments after posting his final Facebook Note, in the shape of a woman’s breasts. Thousands of fans click Like and move on; only one, in a small Icelandic town, sees through the morbid wit and takes measures to save him. Meanwhile, Constable Elsie Kalahash of the Ontario Provincial Police just wants to go on holidays. But when you’re a Cree medicine woman trained in the Backward-Facing Path, there are no days off.”
The cover artwork is by Gavriel Navarro.
The circularity of glosas spins in unexpected ways, catching you unawares, bewildering but enchanting. Gavriel is a perfect example of this. He is a living and breathing person who produced the fantastic artwork you see here. He also wrote a glosa that features in both books… except it wasn’t him so much as a fictional character bearing his name who has a key role to play in the life of Alain C. Dexter — the fictional Alain C. Dexter, not the real one — in the dramatized biography by Elaine Stirling.
Artist, poet, fictional character? Metafiction meets medieval Spanish poetry in modern-day Ontario? It might sound ‘challenging’, but it needn’t be if you don’t want it so. Allow yourself to be swept up and caressed by the circularity of glosas. Before you know it, everything will make perfect paradoxical sense. I know it did for me, which is why I’m proud to be publishing Dead Edit Redo and Dead to Rights.
Greyhart Press 
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This looks great, can’t wait to read this
Good choice. I wasn’t entirely sure whether I’d like it when I first read the books, but they’re not only an excellent read, but they stay in your mind for a very long time. Did for me anyway, which is impressive because I can feel myself getting jaded with all the reading I’m doing.
Well, beta reader team versions for Kindle could well be ready late next week…
BTW: Andy West/ Ian Watson’s big new trilogy is out on Nov 25th. I’ve seen a pre-release copy and it’s very good… Dan Brown but better. There’s a website emerging here: http://www.watersofdestiny.com/
I had the pleasure again this evening of passing it in the company of the much esteemed Professor Alain C. Dexter; we enjoyed copious quantities of an eight percent malt liquor that tasted like sweet black berry juice; stopped ourselves before we needed to find ourselves picking our selves up from the floor. As always, his company inspired another glosa which I transcibe for your appreciation or condemnation below. He is gleefully looking forward in the very near future to the publication of his collection of glosas (please feel free to take a look https://greyhartpress.com/2012/11/22/teasers-dead-edit-redo-dead-to-rights/ ) as are many of us who have come to appreciate his work.
DRINK DEEP, A GLOSA
“There’s music in the sighing of a reed;
There’s music in the gushing of a rill;
There’s music in all things, if men had ears:
Their earth is but an echo of the spheres.”
~Lord Byron
Those deep and ominous echoing peals
haunt yet dreaming belfry shutters;
clatter of clappers crack seasons
of the day across the square and bower
like bolts raining from the fist of Thor
calling forth sprouts of new sown seed
growing, becoming resurrected fangs
that sink into the rays of sun nourishing
the breath of those who listen and bleed;
There’s music in the sighing of a reed;
Drops of dew drop off blades that lick
dawn and noon and dusk from the sinewed
neck of marsh and fen, fiddle heads curl
back gasping as needled daggers thrust and
suck crimson vintage dry as silence between
notes that beat anvil and hammer into sonic thrill
annealing thin stretched vibrations into echoes forever
bound as invisibly as drops of rain and sea drumming
maximum proof mysteries from open mouth of still;
There’s music in the gushing of a rill;
In the corners of the lips of sleeping mouths of babes
and in the spittle flung from were wolvened angry tyrant
jaws; in the whispered trust of lovers tight tipped tongues
as mutual stilettos spike deeper routes into the roots
of songs sung by different growls, by different tunes, by
different orchestras with different strings in different years;
in the panicked screams as bodice dreams are ripped away
and frothing canines gnash harsh morning tears into arias
spurting jugular hopes, then surrendering, arresting all fears;
There’s music in all things, if men had ears:
All systole and diastole beats ring through staffs and troughs
upon which notes are written, each, although perhaps a splinter
of another spike or dip, is unique, a singularity of sound, alone
composed for a single instrument, played by a different throat
or heart or hand leaves, each its own thin or fat scar in the neck
picked from harmonies obvious or hidden by smiles and tears
that pierce the chambers of the heart where sweetness and
horror mix. These few are those who drink from the deep blood
vine whose understanding grows farther as it nears:
Their earth is but an echo of the spheres.
D. Russel Micnhimer 1-9-2013
That’s marvelous. Definitely one to read aloud, though possibly not after 8% liquor. The professor would be pleased to hear that the digital versions of his forthcoming book should pass coding and testing tomorrow.