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. Bennett Leftwich'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