Colorways

With lush neo-concrete poems positioned beside ghostly free-verse texts, Andrew Brenza's Colorways offers multi-vectored and overexposed surfaces that complicate the notion of the person in the world. Selected for the innovative Anhinga Press Visual Poetry Series, Brenza's Colorways is a serial poem of alternating visual and verbal pieces that confronts the problem of emotive expression in an age where everything worth saying may have already been said. Thus, Colorways poses an implied argument with the stultifying world that surrounds it, and offers readers a space to explore meaning freely, a space to be free, to participate with this artist-poet in multiplicities of interpretation and a shattering of the conventions of reading.   Andrew Brenza is the author of numerous books of experimental writing, including the hybrid novel WRYTHM (Montag, 2022) and the visual poetry collection Smear (BlazeVOX, 2021). His latest collection, pod, a book of channeled visual poems was recently released by Ghosttruth, an imprint of Montag Press. Andrew also is the founder and editor of Sigilist Press, a micropress devoted to the publication of visual poetry.   "Pattern is essential to poetry. Repetition, variation, rhyme, stress and emphasis are all features we associate with the sound structure of poetic composition. In Colorways, Andrew Brenza's new collection, the visuals are where these effects happen. The texts of the work are light, open, suggestive, and spacious — but the overprinted fields of letterforms and lines shimmer and vibrate with dynamic energy. Brenza orchestrates the visual components to a symphonic pitch that complements the verbal texts, giving them resonance and graphic assonance. Luscious, sensual, and exciting, these are vibrant typo-poieticworks." - Johanna Drucker "Andrew Brenza's Colorways offers a Neptunian abyss. Each page of embroidered typography is a textual pool to either stare into, like Narcissus, or plummet into, like Icarus. The sunlight flickers off the rolling surf, seducing us to lean in, move closer, tumble." - Derek Beaulieu "Vibrating with visuals, Brenza's text is ghostly yet alive. A spectral voice traverses and transcends imagery and text as 'The Brain-has Corridors surpassing Material Place-'" - Erica Baum