Mirror Magic

by John Sakkis

Poetry. California Interest. "Irresistible and ebullient as your Saturday plans look midweek, John Sakkis' MIRROR MAGIC is a reflective and necromantic gathering that gives back what it asks of a day lived both online and off the 'please leave / this sweet light / and render me / phosphorescent tubeway splatter genome.' Sakkis' spunky challenge to the popular poetics of our time (stuffed armor or ardor) make me wonder what Cocteau might be up to in the 21st Century; maybe directing straight-to-VHS skater videos, scanning the Bay's convex parking bumpers for the myth of the perfect ollie. ''The millennium' is a confusing term / and you are a headless oracle mumbling / 'this generation shall not pass / directly or indirectly / into the abyss.' With grime and pop and savvy, these poems' tricks grind along the silver internet's omnipresences, a gleaming cube of instruction and wise-assed possibility. Enter here, into Sakkis' 'kinky time warp,' a humid mirror where humor and found magic are the blades for the body to open through."--Andrew Peterson

96 pages, Paperback

Published October 1, 2020

About the author

John Sakkis is a poet. His books include Mirror Magic (Roof Books), Nike+ (BOTH BOTH Books), Psychopomp (BOTH BOTH Books), RAVE ON! (BOTH BOTH Books), The Islands (Nightboat Books), and Rude Girl (BlazeVOX Books), as well as numerous chapbooks and ephemera. From 2005-2015 he edited BOTH BOTH, a little magazine of poetry. With Angelos Sakkis, he has translated five books by Athenian poet Demosthenes Agrafiotis: Y’es and Diaeresis (Dusie Press), “now, 1/3” and thepoem (BlazeVOX Books), Writing Dimensions (Green Integer), Chinese Notebook (Ugly Duckling Presse), and Maribor (The Post-Apollo Press), which was awarded the 2011 Northern California Book Award for Poetry in Translation. He was born and raised and lives in the East Bay Area.

Reviews

[Logan · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you've read any of Sakkis's previous books, you'll recognize the staccato rhythm and fascination with sensually odd (grotesque?) imagery, and in this one you'll find a poet still just as interested in the playful and weird, but this time, there's clearly a more personal touch. "...I'm suffering/ an engorged antibiotic emergency/ knowing full well/ that I suffer/ from severe/ nostalgia" he writes in one of the book's many untitled poems, and throughout the book, these poems touch on sentiment, sentimentality, and nostalgia through the lens of someone awestruck, saddened, confused, and, perhaps, lost. But lost only in the way we all are. Diverged off the path until the diverged path becomes the steady path. Then it happens all over again. That's life. Especially as one gets older. This book's title, MIRROR MAGIC, announces the obvious reflection of these poems on one's past, in the vein of John Ashbery, Benjamin Hollander, Michael Palmer, Jack Spicer, and other poets whose influences may not always be readily apparent, but are always under the surface. It's a continued conversation of poetry, not of poets, however, and this book, with its more narrative-like structure, offers a more conversational tone than perhaps any pervious book by John Sakkis (except maybe RAVE ON!). This is a conversation of many, or perhaps its manic energy manifested, where the world is easy to touch, hard to bring in, and harder to bring back. It's a kaleidoscopic world of imagery. a kind of sensory overload, and it has resulted in a book of poems that feel like they're screaming, perhaps in joy, pain, or relief.