locust blindfold stompchant rain,
Neil Flory
arteidolia press, 2026
To experience Neil Flory’s collection locust blindfold stompchant rain is to explore the fringes of structure, sound, and wordcraft. Flory’s lines are frenetic yet deliberate, offering a shrewd perception of the world withdrawn from behind a syntactic curtain. His works project volume, both in their verbosity and their tenor. At first glance, language sprawls the page, dissected and dissonant, but before long what Flory has encoded surfaces to the reader’s awareness. Lyrics by The Doors interject fleetingly into and out of “$$$whiskeytoasts,” interrupting the poem’s deep consideration of life’s transience and opportunities, a sort of carpe diem plea for a rock and roll soul. In the simpler, but no less poignant, “the new arrivals,” Death ponders the wretchedness of his quarry through haiku verse. And the poem “ex” highlights Flory as both a composer of music and verse as it bends the limits of meter and structure, reading something like how e. e. cummings might transcribe a Coltrane set. Weaving musical argot amidst mid-word enjambments and spontaneously-born compound words, the poem escorts its stumbling audience through the crescendo and rapid plummet of heartache. Throughout the collection, Flory’s reader feels as though taken on a journey, shown a glimpse of an experience difficult to nail down, like a waking sleeper parsing details and impressions from a fading dream.
Born and raised outside New Haven along the Connecticut Shoreline, Justin March moved to Saratoga Springs, New York to study English at Skidmore College. After several years of teaching abroad, working as an editor, and wandering the earth, he returned to complete his graduate studies at CUNY City College of New York, earning his Masters in English Language and Literacy in 2011. He taught English in the CUNY system before relocating to SUNY Jamestown Community College in Chautauqua County, where he currently teaches and serves as department chair. In addition to reading and writing, he enjoys drumming with local musicians, hatching plans to travel the world, engaging in hijinks with his wife and three daughters, and pondering the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.
