Beautiful Rush by Marc Vincenz   

​The Blood of Wilderness

​Review by Hélène Cardona

Beautiful Rush by Marc Vincenz 
Paperback: 104 pages
Publisher: Unlikely Books (2014)
Language: English
ISBN-13: 978-0970875020













​Marc Vincenz is one of the most brilliant and provocative poets and minds of his generation and Beautiful Rush, winner of the Unlikely Mississipi Prize, proves a vertiginous and spellbinding read exploring “the rapture of being alive” and “murmuring
/ ancient bone music,
/ skin songs
/ and marrowed incantations.”
Sophisticated, profound, and inventive, it awakens the reader to a wildly intriguing journey encompassing beauty, presence and absence, death, ghosts, memories and dreams, ecstasy and nothingness.  
Kimberly L. Becker, in her terrific introduction, states that “This is poetry that matters through its very quest for meaning: ‘Isn’t there a potential for chaos in everything we see and touch? Where’s the meaning in that?’ This tightly structured and imaginatively expansive work is akin to an Escher staircase, where the laws of gravity are suspended so that we ascend and descend, holding the handrail of impeccable lines, stopping to stand in stanzas of timelessness, some of which lead  ‘out of the honeycomb of life and enter that other world where there are no numbers to contain all of this.’ … At times oracular, always spectacular, the beautiful words in Beautiful Rush will long resonate inside readers’ minds.”
Written with incisive and confounding intelligence, wit, and impertinence, “with the blood of wilderness,” Beautiful Rush transports us to “the marvels / beyond time straight / into the face / of a dimmed / articulate world” and “the color / of pure silence— / that rainbowed tint
/ when night swallows reflections.”

​

---

The reviewer

Hélène Cardona is the author of six books, most recently Life in Suspension and Dreaming My Animal Selves (both from Salmon Poetry); and the translations Beyond Elsewhere (Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac, White Pine Press), winner of a Hemingway Grant, Ce que nous portons (Dorianne Laux, Éditions du Cygne); Walt Whitman’s Civil War Writings for WhitmanWeb, and Birnam Wood (José Manuel Cardona, Salmon Poetry).

The recipient of many awards, her work has been translated into 15 languages. She contributes essays to The London Magazine, co-edits Plume, Fulcrum, and Levure Littéraire, and received fellowships from the Goethe-Institut and Universidad Internacional de Andalucía. She holds a Master’s in American Literature from the Sorbonne, worked as a translator/interpreter for the Canadian Embassy in Paris, and taught at Hamilton College and LMU.
​

---