SONGS TO COME FOR THE SALAMANDER by MARK YOUNG

 

Songs to Come for the Salamander: Poems 2013-2021 by Mark Young 

(Selected & With Introduction by Thomas Fink)

Co-published with Sandy Press (2021)

Price: $27.75

Order through Meritage Press (MeritagePress@gmail.com) and Amazon

from the Introduction by Thomas Fink

Some readers might assume that particular, highly pessimistic generalizations in Young’s poems are actually Mark Young presenting his sense of doom. The little ditty "democracy" registers the claim that "no-one// knows the/ words to" the "song" (the concept of democracy) even though "every-/ one sings" it, and "since violence is learned" tells us that "tolerance is no/ longer available, is replaced by trauma." Although nothing in the poems—not even such affirmations of aesthetic transport as "Constant Craving," which speaks of music "that acts as/ axis to steady everything around"—makes one identify the poet as a bright-eyed optimist, various moments in the work display too much respect for the complexity of cause and effect, limitations of human perception, the transience of trends, and sudden appearances of the unexpected to place sustained credence in large generalizations and foregone conclusions.

Review at Jacket2, Jan 17, 2023

"A swirling life dance" by John Geraets

HEDGE FUND CERTAINTY by THOMAS FINK

HEDGE FUND CERTAINTY
By Thomas Fink
ISBN: 978-1-934299-14-2
Price: $15.00
Pages: 74
Release Date: September 2019

Thomas Fink’s Hedge Fund Certainty, his first book since Selected Poems & Poetic Series, offers several vibrant new series, including the politically charged "Subprime Mortgage Bargain Lot," new poems in the long-running "Yinglish Strophes" and "Dented Reprise," and a host of shorter shaped poems that explore social, psychological, and philosophical concerns in a surreal collage ethos.

You are invited to order the book through Meritage Press' Lulu Account HERE.

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A REVIEW!

Poet Thomas Fink is a landscape artist with words.  And in the same way that landscapes depict disparate objects and spaces in a non-narrative relationship to each other, this literary artist’s poems present what feel like chance clusters of words in their seeming unrelatedness, but which are actually meticulously-composed visual abstractions that tickle, jog, and surprise a reader’s attention.  His is an art of erratic suggestion that deftly conveys a sense of the spontaneous free association. 

 

In his world, rational expectations are playfully ambushed and taunted into yielding and letting go.

 

By turns, we are confronted with possibilities of sense and non-sense that refresh and liberate us from the shackles of meaning.

 

One might experience this as a shower of delight that washes away a staid resignation to what is or seems in favor of a tingling irrational exuberance.

 

In short, the orderly requirements of cognition are neutralized and surpassed in a rare adventure of the unexpected. 

 

So, be cautioned and prepared:  to read and engage with these poems is to take a joyous “magical mystery tour” into an uncharted dimension of experience – a sort of enriching “acid-induced journey” without any disabling after-effects.

-John de Clef Piñeiro, visual artist, composer, 

and free-lance literary and musical reviewer