BREATH

breath.jpg
 
an extended meditation on...the psychic wormholes that allow instantaneous travel along our internal galaxies, that hide just underneath the next memory, the next sentence, and behind the all, the ALL itself—unknowable, perhaps, but in Pines’ poetry nearly imaginable.
— Fred Muratori, The American Book Review

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IN GAY HEAD

over a breakfast of blue
       Wampanoag pancakes
       I read that

                    a "lost world"
       discovered in a Viet Namese
       forest near Laos
       contains
                    a new species
                    of fish
                    a yellow tortoise
                    a sunbird
                    & a mysterious horned mammal
                               how like
                              the Unicorn
                               (who becomes
                              invisible
                              at the first
                              sign of hunters
                              in the wood)
        to have survived
       in what is described
       as
          a tear-shaped
          piece of
          ground

Paul Pines embarks upon a search for cosmic fuel in “Breath,” a book of poetry steeped in a problem with the cellular body. As an asthmatic, Pines writes from an affliction increasingly linked to a childhood upset of immune cells, which lead to a dangerous overproduction of antibodies in the lungs. The archetypal, environmental, psychological, social and spiritual significance of asthma is always in the background of Breath. With feeling and intelligence, Pines illustrates how Breath circulates as poetic form through blocked passages between matter and energy, childhood and adulthood, name and voice, image and articulation, reception and resuscitation.
— Kenneth Warren , House Organ #18, Spring 1997