Dead Letters

The voice in these poems is powerfully deep and inside, as if it's coming up from the bottom of a well. Yet it is also a recognizable voice, one we have in our own heads at certain moments. Alan May has created an echo-chamber of lyric consciousness, not in service of solipsism, but for the purpose of communion. These poems disturb and sadden and charm, but above all they keep us with them. The illustrations, by Tom Wegrzynowski and May, are as other-worldly as the poems, yet the art of this moving and elegant book convinces the reader the other world is where we do our living. Dead Letters is a work of great beauty and force, of intelligence and stark humility. [Maurice Manning]

Situated between abjection and negation, May's playful minimalism explores disquieting gaps and valences in a de-centered Southern landscape, revealing various forms of poetic/cultural dementia; there's Oedipal drama, abcedariums, a parrot named Absalom, the blank stare of aporia, whimsy as heart punch, and well, angel pee. The poems are narrative and nonsensical, but the language that remains gleefully unassimilated into larger conceptual/formal armatures glowers most insistently: "The verse consumed behemoth / as tilted the metropolis"; "By beyond deserve never mind / Me molecule Genghis Khan." Illustrations by Tom Wegrzynowski and May himself add additional doses of creepy pleasure. [Tim Earley, Black Ocean Blog]

Alan May's poems have appeared in The Hollins Critic, The New York Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Plume, Willow Springs, The Hong Kong Review, and others. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Alabama.