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Psyche and Specter
"I sense that I am not complete. Something is missing in me. The rebel angels want the missing part of me." Psyche and Specter is a collection of over four dozen of Chris Moran's best poems, examining the nature of human consciousness, reality, and more. With calculated, cutting language, Moran takes the reader into a journey into the realm of the soul, carving a twisting path through space and time to lay bare the nature of "the ghost that thinks." “Chris Moran's Psyche and Specter is a work that eats its own afterbirth and spits the rind right back on mom." — Sean Kilpatrick, co-author of Anatomy Courses “When Chris Moran tore through the ExPat features rotation, I was approached by several editors desperate to solicit him. Terror House gets the immortal privilege of placing his work in print, and it’s a gift to poetry like no other. This is shrapnel, blunt and traumatic, and Moran explodes abstractions with boundless abandon. One of two or three truly essential contemporary poetry books around.” — Manuel Marrero, author of Thousands of Lies and Not Yet "Psyche and Specter is one of those works of art that reveals its cosmic secrets as much as it begs and hides them through elemental spells, Pleiadian techfeeds, and poetic nebulae." — Durban Moffer
130 pages, Paperback
Published September 21, 2021
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June 30, 2022
Following on the success of poetry collections Night Giver (self-published) and Ghostlord (Solar Luxuriance, 2014), the Uranian gnostic poetry and caustic visionary tales of Chris Moran find their newest and most complete expression to date in Psyche and Specter, released in 2021 on Terror House Press.
We are told early on in this collection that relation of the human spirit to the higher and upper airs is best explored with Tangerine Dream on the stereo. The outer and inner worlds are explored from esoteric enclaves where monastic reverie happens upon a clash of forces incomprehensible yet beckoning.
“I sense that I am in deep trouble with these rebel angels. I owe them something. I owe them something and it is not money.”
***check out the full review on my website for excerpts and further information: https://asatkhora.com/2022/06/20/psyc...
There is not enough garlic in your quinoa to keep the vampires at bay; in fact, these fetch-beasts eat protection magic for breakfast. There’s no point summoning anything whatsoever: the shades, the Old Ones, and the Men-in-Black have breached the walls some time ago. The self and wakeworld are already dissolving into unrecognizable states of consciousness. There’s no crack in the firmament… until you see it, and then you can never return. Your voice is your voice, until it’s not – in that moment when you yourself echo that daimonic command issued here in the poem THE BODY HARP: “Take what I give you and disembowel the sky.”
And while the gnosis Moran is detailing here does not so much set out in search of experience as much as become beset, set upon, by the forces of the outer dark, he does leave us leave an Ariadne’s thread of references: oblique and obvious, to Carlos Castaneda, Phillip K Dick, John Keel, Herman Hesse, Roberto Bolaño, kabbalistic angelology and goetic sigils, The Shiva Sutras of Vasgupta, conspiracy channels on YouTube… And it all culminates in the epic “CHANT OF THE NETHER SPHERES”, the longform culminating piece which occupies the latter half of this volume. I suspect that “the last Romantic poet” and early weird fiction writer, Clark Ashton Smith, would be quite proud of the ethereal violence on display in this text. Perhaps we hear echoes of Will Alexander or Eugene Thacker in the dissonant verbal concretions which seem to go beyond poetry into the realm of anonymous materials, the place where a “wave of biometric cadavers embraces oceans of the invisible.”
These poems occupy the nonplace of all dreams – where the blunt light illuminates Kafka-esque rueful cosmic laughter and cybernetic ventriloquist deception more often than anything recognizable as what we call “enlightenment” or “salvation”. Much is made nowadays of the term “unverified personal gnosis” – I imagine this text might wear that insult as a badge of honor. Grace descends to us only to the extent that we charge the gates and occupy the spectral cathedrals of the higher airs, but it is not apparent that we can remain ourselves if we tarry there for long.
We are told early on in this collection that relation of the human spirit to the higher and upper airs is best explored with Tangerine Dream on the stereo. The outer and inner worlds are explored from esoteric enclaves where monastic reverie happens upon a clash of forces incomprehensible yet beckoning.
“I sense that I am in deep trouble with these rebel angels. I owe them something. I owe them something and it is not money.”
***check out the full review on my website for excerpts and further information: https://asatkhora.com/2022/06/20/psyc...
There is not enough garlic in your quinoa to keep the vampires at bay; in fact, these fetch-beasts eat protection magic for breakfast. There’s no point summoning anything whatsoever: the shades, the Old Ones, and the Men-in-Black have breached the walls some time ago. The self and wakeworld are already dissolving into unrecognizable states of consciousness. There’s no crack in the firmament… until you see it, and then you can never return. Your voice is your voice, until it’s not – in that moment when you yourself echo that daimonic command issued here in the poem THE BODY HARP: “Take what I give you and disembowel the sky.”
And while the gnosis Moran is detailing here does not so much set out in search of experience as much as become beset, set upon, by the forces of the outer dark, he does leave us leave an Ariadne’s thread of references: oblique and obvious, to Carlos Castaneda, Phillip K Dick, John Keel, Herman Hesse, Roberto Bolaño, kabbalistic angelology and goetic sigils, The Shiva Sutras of Vasgupta, conspiracy channels on YouTube… And it all culminates in the epic “CHANT OF THE NETHER SPHERES”, the longform culminating piece which occupies the latter half of this volume. I suspect that “the last Romantic poet” and early weird fiction writer, Clark Ashton Smith, would be quite proud of the ethereal violence on display in this text. Perhaps we hear echoes of Will Alexander or Eugene Thacker in the dissonant verbal concretions which seem to go beyond poetry into the realm of anonymous materials, the place where a “wave of biometric cadavers embraces oceans of the invisible.”
These poems occupy the nonplace of all dreams – where the blunt light illuminates Kafka-esque rueful cosmic laughter and cybernetic ventriloquist deception more often than anything recognizable as what we call “enlightenment” or “salvation”. Much is made nowadays of the term “unverified personal gnosis” – I imagine this text might wear that insult as a badge of honor. Grace descends to us only to the extent that we charge the gates and occupy the spectral cathedrals of the higher airs, but it is not apparent that we can remain ourselves if we tarry there for long.
Displaying 1 of 1 review