Lunic Panzemes

This is a book of readings of readings. It is not analysis it is not a critical discussion it is not the application of a theory or ideology to texts but a record of the conscious/unconscious experiences of reading and engaging with that reading. It is an approach I have advocated for decades: that to understand a text especially one that seems strange or unusual the best approach is to pay attention to one's own reactions - somatic linguistic visual etc. - and then to discuss and think about those reactions. Leftwich in his many volumes and articles about new literatures has developed this approach better than anyone I know including myself. It is perfect for the kinds of experimental and avant-garde writing Leftwich both practices and reads a kind of writing that is opaque to current trends of literary analysis. It is both a guide for potential readers and an act of love and empathy toward the texts and toward the art of writing and reading them. As he says in a conversation about my chapbook shat on a tool Finding meaning isn't a matter of translating the poem into prose it's a matter of paying attention to what the poet is doing with the language. - John M. BennettLeftwich's magnetic nerve valve of gravity his cluster of dendrites thinking spacetime dismantles atoms' going-once-again-and-again cluster of observa to molecular rewriting's pulsing shifters for rerouting peptide sequences and reversing rivers recombining a day's word orders per moments' quantum entanglements counting the syllables one more time. Whether by glitched letterforms or paragraph iron or whether it's by Leftwich anvil[ing] at least a few of his popcorn brutal LUNIC PANZEMES revives the memor[ies] of unread conferences of songbirds. - John Crouse