Reviewed by Charles Borkhuis
Self Geofferential
poems and illustrations
by Geoffrey Gatza
BlazeVOX
February 2025, ISBN: 978–1–609644–82–6, 118 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1609644826
Studded with a series of radiant paintings and collages, poet and illustrator Geoffrey Gatza has given us a dazzling new book of brilliant poems for the mind’s eye to feast upon. And what a feast it is! We move through a menu of exquisite delights that both whet the appetite and stimulate the imagination. A closer look at his visual art reveals that the sky and ground are often presented as shards of colored glass reflecting images of this world, or as Gatza says “I am telling you a story about a sunny day but at the moment it’s raining glass.”
Among the many hats he wears, Gatza is a renowned chef and publisher of BlazeVOX, a highly regarded poetry press and influential e-mag. His latest book, Self Geofferential, is nothing less than a scintillating bouquet of colors, tastes, and branching sensual encounters that can “… change the way you see / The uninteresting and change / How you feel about everything.” This book of roaming aromas and discrete pleasures wants the reader to feel, smell, and taste words in a new way. In slowing time down, we attune to another level of perception “to a spark of inspiration / a surprise so extraordinary / you too will find the human heart burning in everything.”
The perimeters of the book quickly widen to inform us that “childhood is often the biggest little sadness.” It recognizes many fathers’ embarrassment and regret for being “… unable to speak to their sons / about anything meaningful.” There is a poem about little Red Riding Hood told to a child by a loving grandmother who, in the child’s mind, turns into a wolf dressed up as her grandmother and concludes “just maybe, you are a wolf too.” Gatza delights in showing us many sides of ourselves hiding under the same hat.
It is interesting to note that besides being a poet, chef, and editor of the press BlazeVOX, Gatza is also an author and illustrator of many children’s books, the most recent of which is entitled, The Albatross Around the Neck of Albert Ross, Strange Stories for Wild Children (Lavender Ink). Similarly, many of Gatza’s poems carry the sense of childhood adventures and magical mysteries that lie in wait for young and old alike. Even in their sad and somber moments, his poems and illustrations glow with wonder, wisdom, and a delicious sense of playfulness. Suddenly an illustrated head may turn into a Magritte-like apple or fingers twist into the branches of a tree. Often, there are surprising elements of magic realism peeking between the leaves of a forest as if we have just entered an enchanted Henri Rousseau painting.
In his masterly two-part poem, Henry Darger Dreams of Emily Dickinson, Gatza shows his range by evoking the image of cars whizzing past a body lying “face down in the road.” He slowly develops this image into a penetrating meditation on life, death, and rebirth that gives these traditional themes startling new life and urgency. The protean body in question floats from roadside to bedside to dream, from living to dead, to pretending to be dead while giggling in the trunk of a car. So too, the poem turns back on itself in elliptical, unexpected ways. It continually teases out new meanings by rephrasing lines like “Relive the memories of beforetime and find nothing as the answer / to everything,” which two stanzas later become “… to let go / memories of beforetime and locate everything as the answer to nothing.” Multiple meanings reverberate like intersecting ripples around pebbles tossed in a stream.
Gatza’s book is continually cooking up new experiences, exotic taste treats, and sensual liaisons in celebration of living life from top to bottom and back again. Somehow his America is always there front and center, in the big city wilderness, the desert expanse, or sleepy small towns leaning under the shade of trees. He has developed a keen eye and ear for using the right word at the right time in the right way. And in this regard, he catches us bustling and shabby, bright and lonely in a song of sadness and delight. He offers us a master cook’s plate of earthy inuendoes and subtle surprises. One can’t help feeling his generosity of spirit and his soulful blend of words and painterly images that inform this loving, carefully wrought book.
About the reviewers: Charles Borkhuis is a poet, playwright, and essayist born and raised in NYC. His ten previous collections of poems include: Spontaneous Combustion [SurVision] winner of the James Tate Poetry Prize 2021, FINELY TUNED STATIC, poems with paintings by John McCluskey [Lunar Chandelier], DEAD RINGER [BlazeVOX], DISAPPEARING ACTS [Chax], AFTERIMAGE [Chax], and Alpha Ruins [Bucknell University], selected by Fanny Howe as a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Book Award. His poems have appeared in six anthologies and his essays on contemporary poetics were included in Telling it Slant and We Who Love to Be Astonished [University of Alabama]. His work has appeared in numerous magazines and journals including: Brooklyn Rail, Otoliths, Marsh Hawk, Posit, BlazeVOX, SurVision, American Letters and Commentary, Avec, Big Bridge, First Intensity, Five Fingers, Jacket 2, New American Writing, o.blek, Talisman, Verse, and The World. He curated poetry readings for the Segue Foundation in NYC for 15 years. He translated New Exercises by Franck André Jamme [Wave]. His plays have been produced in NYC, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Hartford, San Diego, and Paris and have been published in 4 collections including Mouth of Shadows [Spuyten Duyvil], and Present Tense [Stage This 3]. His two radio plays The Sound of Fear Clapping and Foreign Bodies were produced for NPR [www.pennsound]. He is the recipient of a Dramalogue Award and the former editor of Theater: Ex, an experimental theater magazine. He recently moved from NYC and is presently living in San Diego. He has taught at Touro College and Hofstra University.