Gross Ardor

by Bill Rasmovicz

Winner of the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award, Bill Rasmovicz’s second full-length book of poems, Gross Ardor, focuses on a faith in the alchemy of the imagination. The book is post-apocalyptic in tone, but its incantatory rhythms and perceptual particularities, as they unfold line by line, create a continuously vibrant sense of the phenomenological, the subconscious as a loosely associative narrative that feels, one might say, breathed into existence. It is a visionary and transformative work in which the musicality of language becomes inseparable from the thinking that creates it, and the reader merges with this ongoing depiction of whatever might be said to constitute the world, a voice so urgent and fluid we become one with the book’s central guiding consciousness. Gross Ardor is a truly mesmerizing performance.

Genres: Poetry

92 pages, Paperback

First published August 31, 2013

Reviews

[Brenda · Rating 4 out of 5]

As Bill Rasmovicz notes in “The Mastery of Moving On,” the penultimate poem in Gross Ardor, humans are in need of alchemists to help us to understand the vertigo that occasionally overcomes even the most flippant or most mordant among us. “Good people,” the poet speaks to the audience,

“unzip your spines and lie / limp with me. Listen,

there are so many things we can never reveal until
one of us is on a death bed, until the various
unthinkables happen and part we must.
As Christ’s ribs were pierced, I wonder if all his intentions

went leaking out into atmosphere.”

If words failed even Christ, whose boldfaced words continue to bleed across Bible pages centuries A.D., then it should come as little surprise that the speaker of Rasmovicz’s verse should complain that even the “bones in [his] throat” have settled “out of place” when he is confronted with loss.

And, yet, I found the turns of phrase that Rasmovicz unfurled across line breaks, his linkage of seemingly nonlinkable ideas to be oddly invigorating even as the poet proclaims that “if everything were / good and right we would be as equally fucked” (from “Fields Newly Turned”).

Gross Ardor is a book to appreciate when the reader is eager to stray from linear narration. Although there are moments when a scene seems to be framed so that the reader/viewer might gaze on ordinary bug-life “nibbling the clover,” an unlikely thought is sure to intrude as the speaker suddenly catches sight of his reflection in window glass and wonders if he might “be / more handsome with a bone through [his] nose.” As he gazes on “Fields Newly Turned,” the speaker’s mind turns from poetic to prosaic to elegiac:

“Dear pitch black, why are the moths’ trajectories
so inaccurate around the source cauterizing
wing with wing? I should take a pill, take a lunch—

it is important you know to have lunch
among the graves, to have lived on nothing

but the buzz of the yellow-jacket hovering
in the rose’s white pocket, to know that
rich as the soil is, it needs the pig’s blood
for the trees to be green.

And you, does your head swivel like an owl’s yet?
Does the body instinctively follow?
Here may be the perennial nosebleed
you’ve been looking for.”

Yes, Rasmovicz reminds us, nosebleeds are occasioned by emotions.

Sometimes, the poet’s language verges on oblique punchline as he—for example—exposes the grotesquerie in so-called plain speaking:

“Saying what you think is like taxidermy,

stuffing the dead deer and standing it in your living
room, as if the living room were a forest.” (“Lighthouse in Podunk”)

Although the reader may respond with uncertainty at asides that might be jokes, might be insults, she senses in these utterances an attempt to forge an indirect, but real connection as the speaker asks, “Shouldn’t our dialogue be as visceral as sideways rain?” (“Phasing Out the Dewclaw”).

Overall, I enjoyed the strange shifts of tone when jokiness lapsed into lyricism (or vice versa). Both modes of address seem appropriate given that the pervasive feeling that runs through this book is that of bereavement, of “missing someone.” How does one move on when separation is inevitable? And, yet, despite the unsettling effect of tonal oscillations, I remained encouraged by the staying power of desire, which kept erupting throughout the volume, a bit like those flowers that Rasmovicz describes as “burst capillaries everywhere.” We won’t bleed to death with such poetry.

Discloser: I received this book via First Reads giveaway.

[jess sanford · Rating 5 out of 5]

The speaker of Bill Rasmovicz’s Gross Ardor is a special breed of curator, reaching gracefully yet frenetically into his own microculture of what Franz Wright once called three pounds of haunted meat, and haunted feels like an appropriate word. There’s a momentum throughout that feels like a poltergeist slowly tearing itself apart but gathering steam. The familiar but slightly grainy, through-a-mirror-dimly world of this book is always raining and all too aware that the ‘meat chaos’ of ourselves is only one layer in the future fossil record. I keep thinking the cover is remarkably apt, the entire collection seeming bone-hard in the most delicate way possible, fragile with madness but cut with an almost drug-induced focus and precision. This culture warrior commits seppuku and reflects solemnly on not only his own mortality but the concrete yet ungraspable concept of a lifespan.

Every poem is an endeavor of introspection, the speaker who wears his heart on his rust belt achieving the masterful effect of affecting an unconscious touch to every interstitial image and head-drowning associative leap. The result is earnest, sadly funny, confident and searching, the haunted meat put the warned-against one time too many through the grinder. In an already unbelievably strong catalog from the young 42 Miles Press, a brilliant offering of a book.

[Terri · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poems in Gross Ardor by Bill Rasmovicz are an interesting maze of scenes, descriptions and everything that humans put up with in this life. This is the type of poetry that you don't just read once--you'll want to read it three or four times just to pick up all of the things you didn't catch the first time. Each work also has those quintessential lines that just bring it all home, such as "And what is/the heart but a telephone fluttering with a bomb/threat" from "The Loveliest Cities" or "You created your own weather system by entering a room." from "Migrations Wrested." Simply put, if you like good poetry, you'll want to read this collection.

*Reviewer received the book for free through Goodreads First Reads

[Blue · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to Goodreads First Reads for this book!

I do not read enough poetry, or know enough about poetry, to really give a just review of any poetry book. Gross Ardor is certainly named aptly, for one thing. It also holds moments of brilliance and clarity that linger in the mind for a long time. The Moon's Hind Legs, Otto, The Sky At Ground Level are some of my favorites.

Look at Poland now!

Recommended for poetry lovers and those who spend some time in the lab.

[Paula Mckinley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the kind of poetry that you read, reread, read out loud and then loan to friends. It's incredible, beautiful and thought provoking. :) The imagery is so strong that you picture everything that you see. The cover, with the hummingbird skeleton is a great tie in with one of the poem in the book. I won't spoil it for you. To continue it well worth buying a couple of copies. One for yourself and the other for gifts.