Pseudo-Leopardi's Cantos for the Crestfallen, here translated for the first time from the Romanian original, is a breathless expiration of impossible pessimo-mystical desires for the immanent beyond. In a sequence of thirty one verses channeling the spirits of Cioran, Dante, and the poet's eponym, the Cantos testify to life's senselessness, the necessity of being beheaded, and the love of saints. It is an intoxicated and uncompromising vision: The name of you / Who alter one atom of my sigh is now stricken from life. "Not since Die Nachtwachen (The Nightwatches), published in 1804 under the pseudonym of Bonaventura, a German Romantic of often-attributed yet arguably still uncertain identity, has there appeared such a book as Cantos for the Crestfallen. Also written by an unknown hand, one drenched in a philosophy and poetics of an apocalyptic tone, the latter title rivals its predecessor in both mystery and melancholy. At the same time that the authors of these works tear the mask from the dark face of the inhuman comedy, they practice a reckless wit that makes the blackness of our lives blacker still. Cantos for the Crestfallen in particular flows with gruesome conceits that empty into an ocean of tears, ultimately drowning its reader far from the sight of land, of home, and of hope." - Thomas Ligotti "Like his namesake-by-declamatio, the author of Cantos for the Crestfallen has managed to condense all human afflictions into one solitary fusion of despair, a misery with teeth enough to bite the hand off every nescient and conciliatory illusion. And yet to underpin this breathless, almost throttled, ennui (his own sigh even "drowning in air") there is the resolve and the bitterness of a love affair gone wrong, the unrequited affections, the raw feels of the world's interminable spurning; and all of it a lie, a necrophile's symphony tapped out by a heart made ash of, a heart crawling up a corkscrewed spine to die inside a brain." - Gary J. Shipley "Pseudo-Leopardi's Cantos exhale a spirit of blackened occidental sufism that will make your head spiral." - Pir Iqbal the Impaled "From the enhaloed entrails of a forgotten notebook comes these Cantos for the Crestfallen. These poems describe nothing and enact everything-litanies of a moldering solar refusal." - Rasu-Yong Tugen, Baroness de Tristeombre

The Lost Couplets of Pir Iqbal the Impaled. Trans. Adrian Xavier. ISBN-13: 978-0692596081. ISBN-10: 0692596089. gnOme, 2015. 38pp. $7.00. The one whose gaze sets moths aflame Will not look at me. So blackened is my hanging corpse, So deformed the tree. There is little record of the life of the Albanian poet known as Pir Iqbal the Impaled. The survival of his verses is due to Hilmi Abdyl Maliqi (1856-1928) of Rahovec, who considered them worthy of transcription into the small notebook discovered in 1999 by Prof. Nikoll Krasniqi of the University of Priština. There Maliqi writes of him: “Iqbal was a solitary dervish, originally from Sharra in Tirana, who in his later years dwelled among the caves near the ruined Christian hermitage and monastery at Koriša. As a young man he joined a tekke in Gjakova, but was expelled for unknown reasons. In middle age he led a largely itinerant life, travelling as far Istanbul, Cairo, and Rome, during which period he had contact with Naim Frashëri, who mentions him with regard in the preface to Gjithësia [Omneity], published in Bucharest in 1895 by the Shoqëri e të shtypuri shkronja shqip (Society for the Publication of Albanian Writing). In 1896, he suffered a mental collapse in Skopje and was later identified by Haxhi Ymer Lutfi Paçarizi as ‘mast-Allah’ [God-intoxicated]. His couplets, though heterodox, were known by mouth in the region, mostly among the Melami Sufis of Kosova and Macedonia. After the revolt in 1910, Iqbal publicly renounced Islam at Priština during the visit of Sultan Mehmed V in 1911. The following year, he converted to Christianity and was impaled for apostasy in Prizren. The people of the district, however, regarded his apostasy as false, a perverse expression of his spiritual intoxication (sakr). Thus, after his death, in honor of his mystical inspirations (waridat), he became known as Pir Iqbal the Impaled. The dervish’s soul is lost. By the grace of Allah, his lines are not.” Given the directness and crude gracefulness of Iqbal’s style, his verses present few problems for the translator. To convey something of his rhythm in English, I have split his couplets into stanzas of four-lines. We hope the reader will find them utile et dulce. (from the translator’s Preface) I fly the seas of dreams for you, I swim all the skies. And nowhere do you appear, not Even in your eyes. “It is either by senseless fate or by profound happenstance that these poems have survived their author. Iqbal, the enigmatic, ascetic dervish has left behind lines that are instructions for bewilderment. These couplets reduce mystical writing to its brutalist minimum. Only practice remains.” ~ Rasu-Yong Tugen, Baroness de Tristeombre, author of Songs From The Black Moon “An essential document in the sorrow of being.” ~ Nicola Masciandaro, author of Ocean Seeping Eyes “As the tablet gives lift to its own effacement, so too do these ingots of darkness mysticism render in concise, passionate flashes the continual fluxing destruction and reconstitution at the heart of a yearning spirit’s divine ordeal.” – Levi Rumata, author of Scrims “‘I am love-wounded past repair, / Yet still babble on. / Tis no longer I who speak, but / My severed head’s tongue.’ The Lost Couplets is a deep simultaneous plunge into the possibility of poetry beyond the page and the impossibility of knowledge without sorrow. Be prepared to abandon your desires by listening to the couplets of Pir Iqbal from the mouth of Adrian Xavier; and watch the verses perform a Sufi whirling before your weeping eyes.” ~ Eleni Ikoniadou, author of The Rhythmic Event “Not since Annabella of Ely has a poet so succinctly and masterfully penned the spiraling path to annihilative bliss. Read Pir Iqbal and be destroyed. Being destroyed, may you live forever.” ~ Liesl Ketum, Humbert Divinity School

Subject A. Verses from the Underlands. gnOme, 2016. ISBN-13: 978-0692621578. ISBN-10: 0692621571. 52pp. $6.00. A collection of the fantastical verses of the suspected serial killer known as Subject A, written during his incarceration in a secure psychiatric facility from 1977 to 1980. The poems, baroque reflections of an alternate eldritch reality referred to as “the Underlands,” give seductive and haunting dimension to the poet’s undisproven claim that he never murdered but only “transfigured” his victims in locations “not to be found on any map of the world.” Everyone should be aware that there is a strain of poetry that embraces stricken visions, hopelessly so. They should know that there are bibles of verse, Maurice Rollinat’s Les Névroses for instance, that elegantly sing of sick nightmares and thereby critique the wholesome norm. They should be force-fed this knowledge, if only that they might be robbed of some parcel of their contemptible health. Verses from the Underlands excellently contributes to this mission with its revelations of a supernatural malady with neither a cure nor even an earthly diagnosis. – Thomas Ligotti Some books should be encased in iron and buried in the deepest, blackest hole, never to be read. This is one of them. – Amy Ireland This collection is a valuable and timely addition to the serial killer literature that has emerged from the madness and malaise of 1970s America. Excellently contextualized by a criminologist of patent accomplishment, it has, however, less in common with the poetic invectives typical of the genre, and more, it would seem, with the lyrical tradition of a simultaneously burgeoning heavy metal culture. Taken collectively, Subject A’s charnel verses constitute something like a concept album that—meticulously detailing the terrain of an illimitable and unbounded nullity—reaffirms, for a new generation, the mutually complicit, blackening enamor of heavy metal and serial killing. Verses from the Underlands is metallic mythopoeia at its finest. – Edia Connole, co-author of Floating Tomb: Black Metal Theory Outside the grasp of clinical psychology, exceeding the grip of some penal system, and beyond the pale of civilization altogether, the Real is Subject A’s first victim. These verses traverse vast labyrinthine worlds of doom and slaughtered universes where language is left only two choices: to fall silent or turn into a scream. Lucid and deranged, they allow no hiding place or escape into some system of preservation, for nothing will remain untouched here: and all that stands shall fall “in carnage-fields of blood and flames.” – Cergat, author of Earthmare: The Lost Book of Wars Being someone who generally hates poetry that attempts to beautify life, there is something instantly likable in a poetry that twists life into a dagger aimed at itself. These verses stitch together a Dunsanian dream world, but one made of mortuary cloth. – Ben Woodard, author of Slime Dynamics Worth buying just for the blurbs. – Nick Land

The madness of the intersection, the madness latent in Actually Existing Persons, the madness in the vibration of everyday existence in the land outside the amusement park=island, still atop the bones of the (glorious) dead but walking with the feet of the living and not the living dead, the madness to face the madness of tomorrow and today . . .

A discontinuous continuation of fallen, unfollowable imperatives, numbering one thousand three hundred and sixty-one.

Amuletic Oubliettes is the third poetry collection by oudeís. It assays the subject of lucid dreaming through a geochronology, an horology, a thanatology, a taxonomy, and a teleonomy, and ends with a brief note on dreams.

This chapbook starts by directly addressing humankind’s connection to the vastness of outer space, and sets forth the premise that death (as a permanent state of being) is of the same substance, or soul, as whatever exists outside of the Universe. It then veers off on a tangent into stranger territory, and talks of unnamed worlds, without life yet possessed by some unliving, sentient force, whose spheres have drifted to the most distant regions of outer space; or, more properly, into the nothingness that reigns illimitably outside of space, where it has been speculated that no laws of nature can exist. Gigantic, otherworldly graves abound in rhyming descriptions of lifeless geographies. Monuments, catacombs and buildings, all deserted and of unknown origin, are lyrically narrated into existence deep beneath the surface of the Earth, as well as on and under the surfaces of distant asteroids. Alien cenotaphs resembling something Hugh Ferriss might have sketched from a fever dream are articulated through regular, metered verse. A sinister thread connecting all these massive structures with the aforementioned sentient force, which we are told holds all life and death in its grip, runs through the poems. Hymns to the universe in all its barrenness are juxtaposed with landscapes of horror, all elegantly unscrolled in lurid poetics that are made all the more disturbing by their intentional symmetry. The final poem seems to be a negation of itself, plus all of the other poems in the volume. The book ends with several prose statements of a negative nature concerning the fate of humanity in the Universe. “Odysseus, in Homer’s Odyssey, plays upon his name—Ou-déis/Ou-tis meaning no-one/no-thing—in order, through nomenclatural disorder (or rather: division, divergence), to outwit and outwitness the Cyclops, a creature of singular vision and ultimately also of unbounded blindness. Oudeís, in the spiral consilience, sings a similar siren-song and sets out on a similar voyage, albeit one over the course of which the Ulyssean body, in turn, makes a rather mèticulous U-turn and turns out to be a Mètic Mœbius itself (the Mètic Mœbius stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Masters, Doctors and Readers). “Time left no corpse but infinite space”: here, in the first words of the spiral consilence, the corpus—the collated collection qua bound book—corporealises out of an excised yet all-the-more exquisite corpse. This excision is, precisely, an exacting and enacted kenosis: an open negation that finds affirmation on the very next page and then onward, on and on, from siren-song to siren-song—void vocalisation to vocalised void—to the ever-approaching parousia/ousia beyond the vale of the valley of death/revival/regression/recision-and-reclamation. The recitations herein—the{ir} excisions, recisions, and incantatory reclamations—are those of a rabid iconovore, and each of its devoured figures or forms informs in its deformation and in its devouring the various epitaphs (or rather, chronotaphs: there where time left no corpse but infinite space) of an incomplete whole, of an ongoing hole-complex, full of cross-cutting tunnels as vast as The Great Wall of China: there where they are digging The Pit of Babel qua Garden of Forking Paths (pace Borges and Kafka). Oudeís, in the spiral consilience, engraves in each chronotaph-epitaph—each poetic page—the gist and the widening/planet-wide gyre of the grave-digger, but a grave-digger set adrift on the seas, digging into the tides of today with the oar of Odysseus: that oar of {y}ore which turns out (in yet another Ulyssean U-turn) to be a Golden Rod or Rod of Divination, singing in its Sea-Slicing qua Dowsing-of-the Deep the siren-song of Wor{l}dly Icons and Other Conjurations.” —Dan Mellamphy “If God is the tangential point between zero and infinity, the spiral consilience is a reverberant long playing black work of telepathic theology.” — Doktor Faustroll, author of An Ephemeral Exegesis on Crystalline Ebrasions “My reading of the poems in this book has only confirmed once again that I can no longer respond in any meaningful or robust way to written literature. At this point in my life, I can react only to watching or listening to performances of writing, something that no doubt sounds strange and even pathological to others. Nevertheless it, this is how it is for me. Even my old favorites no longer provoke the interest and emotion they once did. I deeply regret this condition of limitation. I might describe this condition as one of literary anhedonia, likening it to the better known experience of musical anhedonia, from which I also suffer and which I realize is not comprehensible to the majority of individuals. Thus, I must apologize for my inability to offer a blurb to what may very well be a fine book.” —Thomas Ligotti