Empty Suit Press

My latest chapbook pushes the boundary between poet and reader. This book will not be for every lover of poetry, but if you are interested in being challenged, I believe this book will rise to the occasion.

​

​

Excerpt from "A Few Words about:

​

A few words about the concept

Given that a poem, or any work of art, is a collaboration between the creator and the person who reads or hears or views the creation, this collection is an extension of that collaborative experiment.

In the last one hundred or so years, art, in all forms has become more experimental. Deconstruction may have reached its zenith when the artist presented a blank canvas as a finished piece of art, or maybe not. Maybe Andy Warhol’s Invisible Sculpture was the limit. But the limit to experimenting is only bounded by the imagination of the observer.

​

​

The titles for the poems were from a yet to be written collection I have as a working title, of “A Directory of the Hangings on my Walls”. A few months ago, I was listening to an edition of PoemTalk. In fact, it was episode #95, and can be heard hear:

https://jacket2.org/podcasts/i-too-received-identity-poemtalk-95

There are now over 100 of these amazing half hour or so shows, I highly recommend you listen to all of them! In #95 they discuss Robert Fitterman’s Sprawl, where he takes the mall as a backdrop, or even a backbone to build his poems into a cohesive group. I thought I would use the different things hanging on my wall to let me do the same thing.

​

- Anthony Watkins

​