Russell Carisse : Late Summer Flowers, by Julian Day

Late Summer Flowers, Julian Day
Anstruther Press, 2021

 

 

 

One is confronted and comforted by a strange familiarity, in Julian Day’s chapbook, Late Summer Flowers (Anstruther Press). A familiar one seeks out to revisit, or rather revisits one as companion along journeys into memories of past loves, old towns, and localized mythologies. Joined with the start by a poet's familiar, the roads lead back home to the unfinishing resolution of an old lover, a funerary process one is glad to have this companionship for, while tender subjects are rehashed with soft hands. Here also, are the records of out of the way places and their witness to lores of shared culpability in these names expressed, marking places, as they are struck out like passing signs on the highway. Names to be mouthed in their creative destuction. And yet, one is often stopping roadside to pick ditch-weeds, and smoke/share other late summer flowers, with stolen time together in the glacial pause of emence landscapes and small towns, where one can find new points in the constellation of these poems, and feel welcome to revisit moments of transformation, growth, death in this “the final naming of things”.

 

 

 

 

Russell Carisse is currently hiding in the woods, until it's safe to come out. Their half-baked ideas are found in antilang.magazine, The Quarantine Review, Utopia Project, The Pi Review, Funicular, Periodicities, Still: The Journal, The Paragon Journal, in translation at Le Watts Revue, Nomography (Sideroxylon, 2020), and forthcoming debut chapbook BRICKWORKS (Frog Hollow Press).