S(tars) & M(agnets):::Coming Out in 2014!

Follow the tour here!

Praise for S(tars) & M(agnets)

"Impregnable...you almost have to fight it for meaning." Octavian Herescu (Childhood friend)

"They are too interested in their ideas, not interested enough in finding fresh language for them." Roger Mitchell (The Hamilton Stone Review)

"A paradoxical combination of simplicity and extravagance." Allan Briesmaster (Quattro Books)

"These are the kinds of poems I see scholars at University take time to study. I am stunned by what I am seeing." Rudyard Fearon (RWF Publishing)

"Overall I think the poems are quite bad. They're filled with trite and hackneyed poetic cliches like starry skies, midnight seas, dancing sparkles, the desire to commune with trees, the beast of love and so on. There's little in them that's fresh and honest. The effusive emotions they convey feel forced and overwrought. They lack startling, original images  as well as a sense of line, of the sound values of words." Marko Sijan

"s(tars)  and  m(agnets)     a mirakul uv a

book   th narrator sails  flies thru galax

eez  in    a bed uv stars brings his love 

cum thru fire 2 th prson  celebrating n spreding   within    th birth uv unicorns  each lettr  each beet  each blessing is

a book uv  love   uv  daring     2 b now    

writtn on an   olympia typwritr   th tact

ilitee uv   each star  each    moovment 

mesur   brings a nu book uv joy  2 our 

opning hearts    devon gallant has dun

sumthing reelee awesum  n reelee sew

rapturous  stedee   xplorativ   n radiant

all within th wheel uv time  iuv usd selek

tid phrases  from devon gallants writing

2 illustrate th wundrs n powrs uv th word magik heer" bill bissett

"Writing 'S(tars) & M(agnets)' was like giving birth to the sun." Devon Gallant (author)

About S(tars) & M(agnets)

After I completed ABRACADABRA, I felt that I had reached the pinnacle of my own poetic discovery. I had spent several years pushing myself to create poems that I felt journeyed into new and unexplored rhythms and yet were still captivating and alluring lyrically through a hybrid style which fused rhyme and free verse. Mixed with these poems were also my collected efforts at crafting perfect forgeries of Stephen Crane poems, whom I considered one of the greatest of modern poets. For several years after I completed ABRACADABRA, I felt stilted creatively, unproductive, I felt completely cut off from any of my peers and, after over a decade dedicated to poetry, had little to show in terms of recognition or acclaim. I was seriously considering retiring from poetry and pursuing something more rewarding, both financially and critically.

However, over the course of 2012, several changes began to occur. Three seminal, transformative texts made their way into my life in a fashion I can only describe as divine providence. The first of these was Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, followed by Disinformation’s guide to the Occult The Book of Lies, and finally Rob Brezsny’s Pronoia. The powerful effect that these books had over me cannot be overstated and seemingly overnight, I became a Chaos Magician and a champion for Joy. While ABRACADABRA was permeated with dark, melancholy themes of ageing, abandonement, death, and demonic possession, S(tars) & M(agnets) on the other hand is an ode to joy, a completely rejection of sadness, it shines with the bright light of the sun. Rob Brezsny’s phrase “Evil is boring” had become my mantra. And so, in what feels now like a fever dream over a few short months, while everyone was focused on mankind’s inevitable apocalypse, I was already looking forward to mankind’s triumphant rebirth. Read in it’s entirety, S&M is more than just a collection of poems, it is also a hyper-sigil created to have a precise magical effect on anyone who reads it, one of positive and transformative change.

The title S(tars) & M(agnets) is a clear nod to ee cummings first collection Tulips and Chimneys. Where Tulips and Chimneys was a sexual innuendo for genitalia, S(tars) & M(agnets) follows suit with a nod to the sex play of Sado-Masochism, S&M. However, the title S(tars) & M(agnets) takes on a further significance in the division of the book. Following ee cummings penchant for dividing his collections using the words within the title of his collections, S&M is roughly divided into three sections. S(tars)=mystical poems, &=concrete poems, M(agnets)=love poems.

S(tars) & M(agnets) is my fourth completed collection of poems although no full length collection has ever been published of my work. I have eleven chapbooks, all proudly self-published through Cactus Press.

S&M did not make the shortlist for the 2013 Robert Kroetsch Award for Emerging Poets.

In 2014, I was rejected from Concordia University's MA in Creative Writing program.

Poetry submissions taken from this manuscript have been rejected by the following literary magazines:

great weather for MEDIA (New York)
The Bastille (Paris) 
filling station (Calgary)
American Athenaeum
The Hamilton Stone Review (New Jersey)
The Innisfree Poetry Journal
iO: A Journal of New American Poetry
Vallum Magazine (Montreal)
carte blanche (Montreal)
Clapboard House
MadHat Review
Ninth Letter (Illinois)
Newfound
Kansas City Voices (Kansas City)
Paper Nautilus
Bodega Poetry
Queen's Quarterly (Kingston, On)
The Bitter Oleander (Fayetteville, New York)
decomP
Blue Lake Review
Soliloquies (Montreal)
Noctua Review (Connecticut)
Blast Furnace (Pittsburgh) 
Atticus Review
Lowestoft Chronicle
Country Dog Review
The London Magazine
The Oddville Press
Burningwood Literary Journal
Indiana Review
Ithicalit
Hark Magazine
Silver Apples Magazine
The Bacon Review
Kindred Magazine
491 Magazine
Eleven Eleven
AGNI
Passages North
In My Bed (Toronto)
Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Journal
Cleaver Magazine
The Cossack Review
The Journal
Map Literary
The Cincinnati Review
Phantom Limb Press
The Paris American
Leveler Poetry
Klipspringer Magazine
Paragraphiti
New Madrid
Phantom Drift
Dead Flowers
New Ohio Review
Glint Literary Journal
The Literary Review
Dactyl Zine
Literary Juice
Paradise Review
Five2One
Black Bird Magazine
Oxford Magazine
Painted Bird Quarterly
Ghost Ocean Magazine
The London Magazine

S(tars) & M(agnets) has been rejected by the following publishers:

Talon Books (BC)


Poems from S(tars) & M(agnets) have been published by the following literary magazines:

"Salvation" in Issue 4 of The Bellville Park Pages (Paris)
"Chaos" in Beyond Borderlands (online)
"I Am A Shaman" in Beyond Borderlands (online)
"The Carousel at Midnight" in Volume 1: February 2014 of Bitterzoet Magazine (online)
"Moon, Stars, and Grass" in Issue 108 of Crack the Spine (online)
"Paris" in Issue 7 of The Jet Fuel Review (online)
"Untouchable" in Issue 7 of The Jet Fuel Review (online) 

S(tars) & M(agnets) is currently set for release in 2014