Gross Ardor

Poetry. 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.

"'Where have all the alchemists gone? We need them,' writes Bill Rasmovicz in 'The Mastery of Moving On.' Yet Bill Rasmovicz is himself an alchemist, turning the leaden stuff of urban life into the gold of consciousness. Ruthlessly quotidian but not taxed by the commonplace, GROSS ARDOR is a book of poems whose dry heat burns from every page."—Natasha Saje