The Feeling Is Actual by Paolo Javier

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"In Paolo Javier's THE FEELING IS ACTUAL, he writes: 'I've been a grand-gesture guy in the past. & in all likelihood,  I will continue to be one in the future.' Javier hits the big notes in this collection: sex, romance, even aging and regret. The poetry often comes in the form of prose, as the discussion of a play or movie takes the place of life, the characters you and I; of humorous investigation, both abroad (the Philippines) and at home (Queens); and of visual poetry, in which comics collide with sly wit. All this with the multi-cultural vantage we expect from the poet, which comes to the fore in later sections, abetted by found images and typography. 'if I'm like a piece of bok choy then you are probably  a piece of broccoli. It's just the communication thing.' Listen to this book, watch it, lap it up"—Vincent Katz.

The accents in 'The Feeling Is Actual' are shrapnelled clips of attention that cluster in Javier's incendiary field of poetic perception. The texts reconnoiter and reveal, scope and identify the minute registers of alienation and disjunction at the edges of words. Joker: I'm a man of my word. Words that jar with a syllabic static to recuperate a palpable interference in the channels of this racialized/radicalized writing. a missed sipping/ a musty reeve. And reified by the subtle concretions of cartoon and photographic imagery, subtle markings that can turn the page into a post and lead us through the high occupancy lanes of these performances and texts. This is rush-hour poetry, so pay attention! --Fred Wah The best magicians narrate what they're doing and speak so beautifully they can pull off their tricks right before your eyes, candor as gambit. Paolo Javier gives away his plans to combine & recombine handwritten & printed jokes/ song lyrics/news articles/ advertising copy/ with graphic snippets of appropriated cartoons to reduce comic images to visual shorthand, and thus he gets away with murder. As a bakla fan of Paolo's for example, I should be offended at the way he mis-spells Barbra Streisand's sacred name, inducing visual violence, raining fire on hell s vanquished angel, but instead I m well, LMFAO, proving once again Houdini s first axiom: the tarugo s quicker than the eye. --Kevin Killian

About the Author
Paolo Javier is the current Queens Borough Poet Laureate (as of 2011 when the book was published). The recipient of grants from the Queens Council on the Arts and New York State Council on the Arts, he is the author of five chapbooks and three full-length poetry collections, including THE FEELING IS ACTUAL (Marsh Hawk Press), 60 LV BO(E)MBS (O Books), and 'the time at the end of this writing' (Ahadada Books), which received a Small Press Traffic Book of the Year Award. He edits and publishes 2nd Avenue Poetry, a tiny press devoted to innovative language art, and curates Queens Poet Lore, a roving literary series that takes place across the borough.

Paperback: 156 pages
Publisher: Marsh Hawk Press (October 4, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 098463533-5
ISBN-13: 978-09-8-463533-7
Product Dimensions: 7.2 x 0.5 x 10.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 12 ounces