Release Reading for Alphabet Noise by Tom Townsley

“Exuberant, amphibian and phantasmagoric!”

The sixth full length collection of poems from Thomas Townsley is an imaginative tour de force. “Do you seek le mot au jus?” “Don’t read too much into the falling apple blossoms.”  “They say a man who breaks forms is often broken by them.” “The instructions were never quite right    never quite clear…” “(The narrator raises an eyebrow and offers the reader a spoon.)” “But enough mimesis.” The poems in Alphabet Noise push language to a breaking point, beyond which it is possible to glimpse…what exactly? “The radio hisses.” “The reader is reminded that ‘some slippage is inevitable.’”

Praise for Alphabet Noise:

Alphabet Noise is an immersive experience, a croquembouche of crunchy predicates and polysemous jouissance. A wang dang doodle. A dynamo of “mad sleeping alphabets” galvanized by the noise of construction. Sparks flying. The blinding light of a welder creating a chassis of vocable transport. This is the noise of the poet as maker, the poet as innovator and explorer. The language is exuberant, amphibian and phantasmagoric. Intellect is endowed with puckish autonomy, a verbal acrobatics and jubilant excess which functions as an antidote against the toxins of those who would try to control and undermine the true merit of words, which is yet to be fully realized. This is the factory. This is the place where things get made. Hyper-objects. Philosophies. Le paradoxe de Mallarmé. “In the lit Palace of Nothing there are only voices.”

-John Olson
Author of numerous books of poetry and prose poetry and recipient of The Stranger’s 2004 Literature Genius Award. His seventh novel, Unfinished World, is forthcoming from Quale Press

Open to the public

Donations welcome. Books will be available for sale.

This reading will be live streamed on YouTube @theothersideutica.

Order the book here:

https://doublymad.org/Alphabet-Noise