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Elixir Verse Equinox: Stella Verses
When we look to the stars we see illustrations of myth, we ponder the possibilities of other worlds, of other beings, of times and realms beyond. On the fringes of the galaxy, in the spaces between particles, in the sonder that the stars inspire—that is where Stella Verses lays its scene.
After publishing our first collection, one focused on the earth beneath us, there was nowhere to go next but to the stars above. Featuring the works of 32 authors and artists from around the globe, Elixir Verse Equinox: Stella Verses is a constellation of a collection that will take you on journeys both infinite and intimate, united by a sense of cosmic wonder.
As Autumn settles in around us and the nights grow longer, remember there is hope even in (especially in) the dark. Look to these words as you would the points of a constellation—each one part of the grand story we all are living out, here on what Carl Sagan once so poetically called, “a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.”
The wisdom of the night is captured here in ink. Drink it up and let your mind surrender.
After publishing our first collection, one focused on the earth beneath us, there was nowhere to go next but to the stars above. Featuring the works of 32 authors and artists from around the globe, Elixir Verse Equinox: Stella Verses is a constellation of a collection that will take you on journeys both infinite and intimate, united by a sense of cosmic wonder.
As Autumn settles in around us and the nights grow longer, remember there is hope even in (especially in) the dark. Look to these words as you would the points of a constellation—each one part of the grand story we all are living out, here on what Carl Sagan once so poetically called, “a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.”
The wisdom of the night is captured here in ink. Drink it up and let your mind surrender.
120 pages, Paperback
Published September 22, 2024
4 people want to read
About the author
C. Brennecke
6 books5 followersC. Brennecke is a multimedia artist and writer, hailing from the suburbs of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She’s a proud alum of Temple University and her passions include art, feng shui, Tarot, tabletop roleplaying, exclaiming every time she sees a dog, and any creative outlet that lets her put her imagination to work. She’s also an avid cuddler and sushi eater and thinks that she could one day go pro in either sport.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
December 8, 2024
Poets have always looked to the stars for inspiration, seeing in them a sort of Rorschach test betraying whatever is on their minds. As Marie-Eve Bernier wrote in her short story "Bright Like Stella:" "tarot cards don’t give answers, they show you the answers you already have inside of you." I think that this is a common misunderstanding people have about divination practices: they're less about predicting the future that the gods have set in place, and they're more a tool to help us slough off the waking mind, that thing which over-categorizes and deadens within the confines of decorum and cliche. Art thus is a kind of divination, where as you create you discover what you really wanted to say.
Unfortunately, many of the pieces in Elixir Verse Equinox: Stella Verses shied away from that transcendent demand, instead staying surprisingly grounded in cliche or trend. That isn't to say that the collection was all bad, but I think that the editors would have benefited tremendously from being more picky with their choices. They could have easily culled half or even two thirds of the works published in here, which would reduce it from the size of a book to a quarterly or monthly journal. Sure, this would be somewhat exclusionary, but editing and curation always are, they always require choosing. If you publish everything, you're not a journal or a publisher: you're a social media platform.
That's what a lot of the weaker poems felt like to me: a step or so above Insta poetry, but still heavily indebted to the vibe of astrological and new age thought popular on Instagram, Tumblr, and Pinterest. This alone wouldn't spoil the collection for me; as I mentioned at the start, these forms of divination like astrology and tarot are ancient traditions, and there has to be something to them, otherwise they wouldn't have been passed down for millennia. However, this mystery doesn't automatically translate to profundity or publishing potential, as this collection often shows. A good many of the poems slip into the exact same train of thought, making the collection feel a bit repetitive at times. The general worldview among the authors here seems to be a sort of pantheistic neo-spiritualism where the main creed is "we are all stardust." We hear this so often, specifically the word "stardust" itself, that it becomes a cliche within the collection, if it wasn't already one outside of it.
The pieces which I felt were most successful were the ones which broke from the stereotype and did something unexpected, all the while holding to the theme of stellar mystery. This included essentially all of the short stories except for the first one, which were consistently memorable and at times excellent. "Maiden's Voyage" was a cute twist on the stellar theme, "All the Time" elaborated creatively on the "sonder" that the editors mentioned in the preface, and "The Woman Whose Hair was the Sea" was an original and tasteful twist on mythology. By the end of the collection, these short stories (and the scattered exceptional poems) felt similar to how the naked eye only sees the brightest stars, while the rest are still out there, but aren't visible. Just because we have the technology to see all those stars in the background doesn't mean we need to see them, nor will they add any mystery. If anything, the crowded telescopic night sky becomes overwhelming, a sort of sensory overload that makes us feel even more alone in the universe. Our imperfect eyes are all we need to get that sense of wonder about the universe, and I find that science almost always smothers aesthetic appreciation.
I appreciated the ekphrastic tenor of the book, and I liked the interspersing of images throughout much more than many journals who confine all their art (or all their poems) to a single section. However, the collection should have started with some of those stronger poems, rather than the ones it did. You only have so long to grab the reader's attention, and in this brutal attention economy, we're all fighting against much more addicting and attractive mediums like Youtube and Instagram. I also appreciated that the collection's tenor broke with the negativity and ragebait that's in vogue online these days, instead opting for a more wholesome approach a la Mark Van Doren. Not only is he one of my favorite poets of all time, but he's also mentioned by name at the start of "The Centuries are Stars" by Allison Burris. I loved how this poem started ("Come child—your bedtime story / I’ll read it in your forehead") and ended ("Tomorrow is the sky, far away and long ago / so go to sleep child, / hum with your meteorites"), but sandwiched between these memorable, original phrases were more cliches about "return[ing] to stardust."
I've experienced widely varying levels of editorial interpolation: from my poetry, which never has been changed by editors, to my essays/reviews, which sometimes have been extensively edited. This collection would have benefited from a more invasive approach to editing, especially through noticing those trends and culling them where possible, making way for something more transcendent and memorable. For example, St. Augustine's famous autobiography "The Confessions" isn't famous simply because it covers the deeply personal topic of religious conversion and belief, but because of insights such as "Our heart is restless until it finds its rest in God." Timeless, memorable truths like this will always win out against trends, no matter how popular they are in the moment. Though it makes some similar points to the first short story, I think that "Swimming (dream)" by Olivia Kamer is a far more successful piece of writing, especially its start:
The way my grandmother’s face
comes to me in dreams, large,
unattended, as if the face was
separate from the body, all features
shown in sharp clarity
and she tells me something
silly with her blue blue eyes
which spill over like so much
water and I (in my dream) can go
for a little swim in the pool.
It’s like that—
how a certain slant of light
splits time open like a
peeled orange, like a
jewelry box, like a
pair of lips
The entire thing is memorable, showing us instead of telling, using gentle repetition ("blue blue") and fresh similes ("peeled orange," "jewelry box," "lips"). It's a challenging thing to write poetry worth reading, and the reason why I'm hard on poets (and myself) isn't because I'm an elitist; it's because I know what poetry can be, and I get frustrated when we sell ourselves short, when we settle for middle of the road, for things which are "just okay." As more than a few of these pieces point out, we've only got so many moments, so many minutes, so many books we can read in this short life, so let's make them legendary!
Note: I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
Unfortunately, many of the pieces in Elixir Verse Equinox: Stella Verses shied away from that transcendent demand, instead staying surprisingly grounded in cliche or trend. That isn't to say that the collection was all bad, but I think that the editors would have benefited tremendously from being more picky with their choices. They could have easily culled half or even two thirds of the works published in here, which would reduce it from the size of a book to a quarterly or monthly journal. Sure, this would be somewhat exclusionary, but editing and curation always are, they always require choosing. If you publish everything, you're not a journal or a publisher: you're a social media platform.
That's what a lot of the weaker poems felt like to me: a step or so above Insta poetry, but still heavily indebted to the vibe of astrological and new age thought popular on Instagram, Tumblr, and Pinterest. This alone wouldn't spoil the collection for me; as I mentioned at the start, these forms of divination like astrology and tarot are ancient traditions, and there has to be something to them, otherwise they wouldn't have been passed down for millennia. However, this mystery doesn't automatically translate to profundity or publishing potential, as this collection often shows. A good many of the poems slip into the exact same train of thought, making the collection feel a bit repetitive at times. The general worldview among the authors here seems to be a sort of pantheistic neo-spiritualism where the main creed is "we are all stardust." We hear this so often, specifically the word "stardust" itself, that it becomes a cliche within the collection, if it wasn't already one outside of it.
The pieces which I felt were most successful were the ones which broke from the stereotype and did something unexpected, all the while holding to the theme of stellar mystery. This included essentially all of the short stories except for the first one, which were consistently memorable and at times excellent. "Maiden's Voyage" was a cute twist on the stellar theme, "All the Time" elaborated creatively on the "sonder" that the editors mentioned in the preface, and "The Woman Whose Hair was the Sea" was an original and tasteful twist on mythology. By the end of the collection, these short stories (and the scattered exceptional poems) felt similar to how the naked eye only sees the brightest stars, while the rest are still out there, but aren't visible. Just because we have the technology to see all those stars in the background doesn't mean we need to see them, nor will they add any mystery. If anything, the crowded telescopic night sky becomes overwhelming, a sort of sensory overload that makes us feel even more alone in the universe. Our imperfect eyes are all we need to get that sense of wonder about the universe, and I find that science almost always smothers aesthetic appreciation.
I appreciated the ekphrastic tenor of the book, and I liked the interspersing of images throughout much more than many journals who confine all their art (or all their poems) to a single section. However, the collection should have started with some of those stronger poems, rather than the ones it did. You only have so long to grab the reader's attention, and in this brutal attention economy, we're all fighting against much more addicting and attractive mediums like Youtube and Instagram. I also appreciated that the collection's tenor broke with the negativity and ragebait that's in vogue online these days, instead opting for a more wholesome approach a la Mark Van Doren. Not only is he one of my favorite poets of all time, but he's also mentioned by name at the start of "The Centuries are Stars" by Allison Burris. I loved how this poem started ("Come child—your bedtime story / I’ll read it in your forehead") and ended ("Tomorrow is the sky, far away and long ago / so go to sleep child, / hum with your meteorites"), but sandwiched between these memorable, original phrases were more cliches about "return[ing] to stardust."
I've experienced widely varying levels of editorial interpolation: from my poetry, which never has been changed by editors, to my essays/reviews, which sometimes have been extensively edited. This collection would have benefited from a more invasive approach to editing, especially through noticing those trends and culling them where possible, making way for something more transcendent and memorable. For example, St. Augustine's famous autobiography "The Confessions" isn't famous simply because it covers the deeply personal topic of religious conversion and belief, but because of insights such as "Our heart is restless until it finds its rest in God." Timeless, memorable truths like this will always win out against trends, no matter how popular they are in the moment. Though it makes some similar points to the first short story, I think that "Swimming (dream)" by Olivia Kamer is a far more successful piece of writing, especially its start:
The way my grandmother’s face
comes to me in dreams, large,
unattended, as if the face was
separate from the body, all features
shown in sharp clarity
and she tells me something
silly with her blue blue eyes
which spill over like so much
water and I (in my dream) can go
for a little swim in the pool.
It’s like that—
how a certain slant of light
splits time open like a
peeled orange, like a
jewelry box, like a
pair of lips
The entire thing is memorable, showing us instead of telling, using gentle repetition ("blue blue") and fresh similes ("peeled orange," "jewelry box," "lips"). It's a challenging thing to write poetry worth reading, and the reason why I'm hard on poets (and myself) isn't because I'm an elitist; it's because I know what poetry can be, and I get frustrated when we sell ourselves short, when we settle for middle of the road, for things which are "just okay." As more than a few of these pieces point out, we've only got so many moments, so many minutes, so many books we can read in this short life, so let's make them legendary!
Note: I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
Displaying 1 of 1 review