Candice Louisa Daquin Reviews John Biscello’s Arclight

What an incredible and irreplaceable collection. John Biscello has already earned his stripes with the first poem in his book Arclight. Biscello has that very rare quality of being a natural born poet. His use of words is so sublime and striking, it has the power to cast into shade, most other poets. Such is his radiance, I find the consideration of light for the subject matter of this book to be very apropos. Biscello understands words and language, his mind is vast and deep and he is able to mine the very depths and bring to the surface language that takes your breath away. It has been a very long time since I have sat quietly entranced by a poet. Usually, we dip and feel certain poems acutely but for the entire experience to sweep us into silence, where nothing we say in response could ever articulate the feelings produced, well that is rare. Biscello’s exquisite mind and vast imagination ensure this book is a journey you will want to take more than once. I found myself entranced by his capture and the vivid landscapes of his mind. The turn of prose and poetry interspersed with a sense that this is his only true language took my breath away and left me reeling with envy and respect for someone so nimble at playing poetry’s pipe. The poets ability to combine knowledge with emotional observation is often clumsy and self-conscious, but when Biscello writes about Ophelia or any other icon of old, he does so with the deftness of the masters who invented such icons, handling the past and present simultaneously through his linguistic ability to place words exactly where they should be. Biscello writes sadness with such a searing beauty that it is impossible to dampen the euphoria you feel upon picking up Arclight. Every edge of his work appears intensely thought out and at the same time, effortlessly fluid. Biscello is a bard of language and emotion, and it would not be premature to pronounce him among the finest living male poets of his day.

Arclight is available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other major online book retailers.

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Indie Blu(e) Welcomes JOHN BISCELLO

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Originally from Brooklyn, New York, author, poet, playwright, and performer, John Biscello, has lived in the high-desert grunge-wonderland of Taos, New Mexico since 2001. He is the author of two novels, Broken Land, a Brooklyn Tale and Raking the Dust, a collection of stories, Freeze Tag, and a children’s book, Once Upon a Time: Classic Fables Reimagined. Broken Land was named Underground Book Reviews 2014 Book of the Year.

Unsolicited Press, an indie press out of Portland, OR, has released a second edition of Raking the Dust, and will be doing the same with Broken Land (August 2018), leading up to the release of his new novel, Nocturne Variations (November 2018).

 

AVAILABLE WORKS

RAKING THE DUST

Raking the Cover

In this rogue’s tale, full of sound, fury, and surrealism, we meet Alex Fillameno, a writer who has traded in the machine-grind of New York for a bare-bones existence in the high desert town of Taos, New Mexico. Recently divorced and jobless, Fillameno has become a regular at The End of the Road, the bar where he first encounters the alluring and enigmatic D.J., a singer and musician. Drawn to her mutable sense of reality, the two begin a romance that starts off relatively normal. When D.J. initiates Alex into the realm of sexual transfiguration, however, their lives turn inside-out, and what follows is an anti-hero’s journey into a nesting doll world of masks and fragments, multiples and parallels, time-locks and trauma; a world in which reality is celluloid and what you see is never what you get.

FREEZE TAG

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It wasn’t a bad neighborhood, just coarse and ingrown, with too many nerves wired to the same frequency. Comprised of five stories and a novella, Freeze Tag takes you inside the heart of Bensonhurst, the “Little Italy” of Brooklyn. A boy teaching himself how to “disappear” as his family collapses around him; a group’s last desperate hurrah at a dive strip club; a comic book artist returning home to grieve his lost childhood love; a middle-aged woman using baby-talk to seduce her daughter’s boyfriend-these and other storylines mix concrete grit with magic realism in rendering an essential portrait of The Old Neighborhood.

More of Biscello’s work can be found on his blog

Spoken word tracks, radio theater, and other clips can be found on his Soundcloudand youtube channels:

Amazon author page

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