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Where Sands Run Finest (DarkWinter Press, 2024) is a lyrical tribute to the liminal landscapes of time, memory, reveries, spirituality and the human condition.
Foregrounding the author's life experiences through an aesthetic and defamiliarized lens, the collection's forty-eight poems serve as an artistic awakening to themes of identity, heritage, generational trauma, motherhood, love, loss and existential querying.
From life's transient halcyon moments through to the complexities of the metaphysical, the narrative captures the lexicon of time's delicate rhythms within the human experience. Hence, the title 'Where Sands Run Finest' embodies both the "temporal hourglass" and an awareness of time in "otherworlds" born of cosmic, esoteric and subconscious realms.
The book's poetic journey also navigates the sands of a cathartic landscape that offers refuge from our onerous existence. A sanctum honouring the imprints left by literature and art, music's lasting echoes and the conversations suspended in places we never quite leave in spirit.
This dialogue ties cinematically into the arc of the collection whilst leaving an intrinsic space for wonder and inquiry in the audience's mind. To be poised in the duality of both observer and subject is essentially how these forty-eight poems converse.
"Looking through the glass, I saw the sleeping woman I was. To awaken her would be an act of both fear and self-love – but one which I owed to myself."
Where Sands Run Finest ultimately resonates with a vivid and timeless universal language — one of lucidity, surrealism, empathy and along the way, doses of "ordinary magic".
ADVANCE PRAISE
"Vikki C.’s poetry shapes a delicate, mournful terrain out of juxtaposition, where ruminative narrative, family memories, broken relationships, elide edgily through loss, longing, surreal discovery. A tightrope of grief, anger and joy are woven in the nostalgia of the what-might-have-been, impossible romantic tropes, traversals across worlds, considering the musicality of new approaches to immigrant stories and sacred enclosures. Along the way, places gather up in a conclave of interrogatory intersection. Her poems create echoing loops from erudite fragments, philosophical inquiry and critique, tracing associations between beauty, anguish, terror, and melancholy; negotiating closure as perhaps unreachable. A project of deftly nuanced visions, its depth-charge of imagery builds, untangles, through breathtaking, original voicings. “Where Sands Run Finest” is gorgeous, a lyrical tour-de-force collection."
— Robert Frede Kenter, author of Eden and EIC and publisher of Ice Floe Press
"Vikki C.'s Where Sands Run Finest, is an audacious exploration of life. It has genuine depth and is brimming with introspection, highlighted in 'Between the piano and dolour / all we have is Kafka'. The poet offers up a meditative haven and urges us to 'just sit in silence / watching out for one another' thereby commenting on the intricacies of human connection. The imagery is as poignant as it is jaw-droppingly beautiful - see how 'your body / enfolds as a broken bird / in the last garden' captures the transience of existence. Where Sands Run Finest is a symphony of language; a poet working at a level most of us will never achieve. What a debut full-length collection! Such a talent - it's enough to make you sick!"
— Alan Parry, EIC of The Broken Spine and author of Neon Ghosts, Echoes, and Twenty Seven
The Art of Glass Houses (Alien Buddha Press, 2022) traverses a surreal landscape of recollections that lead the reader through an intimate "stream of consciousness" in a profound and experimental fashion.
Channelling the author's own experiences, cameos of life, loss, grief, death and reformation come into focus within a time lapse that transcends nature's own. Seasons of flourish, sparsity and reclamation are driven along by the common thread of rejuvenation in a nuanced and enlightening manner.
The narrative presents the human condition in a contemporary and arresting style, distilled through vivid aesthetics and unexpected turns, at the same time challenging the audience to stand on either side of the glass "observatory" – to deliberate both the origin and tenor of humanity – all the while embracing a genuine and compelling dialogue with "everyday wonder." Sometimes the universe's questions are best addressed by the artist and The Art Of Glass Houses showcases this astutely through an enthralling multi-sensory journey.
Dusklight Through The Dogwood Bower (Origami Poems Project, 2023). A special origami-style micro chapbook of six imagistic poems connected by landscape, heritage and memory.
A poem from the micro chapbook:
The Artist's Good Faith
The overgrown fence has its calling
No need to move it afield,
or behind the church.
The soft territory of women stays small.
Light threading leaves denser than loss.
See the peonies larger than my fist?
No fear of what prowls on the other side.
Morning glory encroaches my dying hour
attracting those unmanned prayers.
Something holy haloes the milkweed choir
and I realise, this is the place to fall heavy.
Where men pass by with nothing to say. Grace?
Great divide, I had given up on the world,
but all these pheromones to court one loner?
Now, I shall think of you as the exception.
Sudden flowers in the existential crowd.
And today, I should paint you
— before you leave.
No need to move it afield,
or behind the church.
The soft territory of women stays small.
Light threading leaves denser than loss.
See the peonies larger than my fist?
No fear of what prowls on the other side.
Morning glory encroaches my dying hour
attracting those unmanned prayers.
Something holy haloes the milkweed choir
and I realise, this is the place to fall heavy.
Where men pass by with nothing to say. Grace?
Great divide, I had given up on the world,
but all these pheromones to court one loner?
Now, I shall think of you as the exception.
Sudden flowers in the existential crowd.
And today, I should paint you
— before you leave.