Gross Ardor - Bill Rasmovicz

Winner of the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award, Bill Rasmovicz's second full-length book of poems, Gross Ardor, focuses on a faith in the alchemy of the imagination. The book is post-apocalyptic in tone, but its incantatory rhythms and perceptual particularities, as they unfold line by line, create a continuously vibrant sense of the phenomenological, the subconscious as a loosely associative narrative that feels, one might say, breathed into existence. It is a visionary and transformative work in which the musicality of language becomes inseparable from the thinking that creates it, and the reader merges with this ongoing depiction of whatever might be said to constitute the world, a voice so urgent and fluid we become one with the book's central guiding consciousness. Gross Ardor is a truly mesmerizing performance.

Where have all the alchemists gone? We need them, writes Bill Rasmovicz in "The Mastery of Moving On." Yet Bill Rasmovicz is himself an alchemist, turning the leaden stuff of urban life into the gold of consciousness. Ruthlessly quotidian but not taxed by the commonplace, Gross Ardor is a book of poems whose dry heat burns from every page. —Natasha Sajé With a nearly archaeological enthusiasm for the layeredness of language, perception, and memory, Bill Rasmovicz's Gross Ardor excavates the groove canals, pulls up the faceplates, lets the depth-charges blossom. These poems have surprise-fight in them. They have guts. They erupt. They go the surgical distance all along the horizon and even out beyond it implying you in everything making way for a soul, then walking you through it. —Matt Hart Perhaps Gross Ardor is what happens in a world bent on repeating the same thoughts, same horrors, and the same old consumer driven, if not to madness, then despondent and aghast enough to insure madness is always nearby, well within earshot, and not quietly saying what it would say. Gross Ardor goes out there beautifully insisting no, that was just one of our favorite sons trying to be divisive again. "When studied long enough, all things acquire human form ... HAIL, AMERICA, VICTORIOUS! ... You were the animal they warned you about." –Peter Richards