F IN by Carol Guess

What started out as a novella transformed itself completely as Carol Guess began removing sentences and individual words creating a new text of poems. F IN is published by Noctuary Press and iIn this collection, what was once a girl narrating a crime story is now a contemporary piece filled with the light spaces between illuminating words. While I may not be able to produce the pages and their text exactly, I will do my best to portray this stunning collection that allows the reader to absorb each word’s importance into their own imagination. No two experiences will be the same and I can only share my own perspective. I am unable to space out the words on the page when I go to post these pieces, just know that the poems are spaced out among the page to reveal the words that have been deleted as well as the words that have been kept. Below, a short sample of the gems inside:

city of alleyways disappearing mountains
winding
roads rockslides ghosts serial killers
guard dogs Minutemen meth labs
city of
clear-cut

identical floor plans

erase

place

As you can see, it is difficult to get the spacing correct but what I love is that an entire novel has been trimmed down to a new essence. In this space, it allows me to picture my own world, and I think of El Paso, TX where I once lived with the winding roads of the mountains and the cookie-cutter houses you could see from the top. The words “erase” and “place” make me wonder if the story’s speaker is trying to erase the location from memory and as a poem I mentally erase the image in my own mind. It’s an interesting take on creating prose or poetry by erasing a much more dense, rich text of a novella.


buried the
creepy guy

‘s key

Of course, it is easy to read this as one sentence all to itself which is at once an extraordinary thing to create after erasing a page of text and also entices the reader to figure out what the rest of the page might have said. The story line also makes me wonder who “the creepy guy” is and I form my own image imagining a young girl getting a hold of a key and burying it, but a key to what? Myself and the reader are left to create their own mystery and I like that this allows me to ignite my own imagination.

As is it difficult to properly portray the text on the page, I implore you to find or buy a copy of F IN by Carol Guess for yourself. If you enjoyed F IN by Carol Guess, you may purchase a copy from Noctuary Press for $14.00 at:
http://noctuarypress.com/catalogue/

Thanks always for reading, please stop by again next week…