LATE HISS by Paul Ebenkamp

LATE HISS by Paul Ebenkamp is the 2021 winner of the Desert Pavilion Chapbook Series judged by Nicholas Gulig. Of Ebenkamp’s collection, Gulig writes, “Like so much of the art that moves me, Late Hiss exists as a kind of wilderness, by which I mean it both is and isn’t there, apparitional in its disclosures, a song whose incompleteness echoes in the dark and fertile opening between the world of things and the ideas we struggle to tether to them. It isn’t possible to know with certainty who speaks in a book like this or where the voice originates, what half-imagined landscape it unfurls itself across. In “Aidos,” for example, the speaker moves among the re-collected fragments of a collage, “ensconced in its quantum funhouse,” passing paintings and citations, the “bright place” and “mercy basics” of an imagined sunset the only point of light, a fleeting mooring. The experience, both for the speaker and for the reader, is one of a dissociation made hospitable by a fragmentary sonic grace that one could listen to and lose themselves among, the music’s glitchy brilliance performing in the hiss and undertow. These are poems that leave me sober in my lostness, in my awe.”

Paul Ebenkamp is author of The Louder the Room the Darker the Screen (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2015) and Parallel Realism (Despite Editions, 2017). With Andrew Kenower he hosts the Woolsey Heights reading series from their home in Berkeley CA. He occasionally releases music under the name Position (paulebenkamp.bandcamp.com). The Bottom-Right Corner of All Things, a pdf of visual art, is forthcoming from Compline Editions.