Get yourself a copy of this book! No, not because Erecting the New Zion adorns the cover, but because the poetry and prose on the pages within evoke a dream-like and surrealistic portrait of life and love in America.
Some reviews:
Each portion forming a reduced-size copy of the whole, a fractal is forever fragmented, both chaotic and ordered, endlessly complex. Timothy Green’s American Fractal sees this pattern emerge from the fabric of modern culture, as it navigates the personal, the political, and the metaphysical, in a lyric dreamscape in which an eerie chaos lurks just behind the façade of order—where “what looks like / a river…could be a log,” “…as if accident were / the fundamental attribute of life.” In separate poems, one man sells ad space on his forehead, while another examines the multitudes of his own voice on an audio cassette recorder. Each life is but another section of the fractal, the past and the future two mirrors that face each other to perpetuate the illusion of infinites. At turns evocative and sweetly ironic, Green straddles the line between accessibility and complexity, exploring “how the wind whispers our secrets,” how “that little tremor” of understanding “touches your sleeve, lets go.”
“The poems in Timothy Green’s American Fractal find love within love; landscape within landscape; the ‘I’ and ‘you’ nestled within the bigger ‘I’ and ‘you.’ Unpredictable, uproarious, and true to the wonder of the moment, Green’s poems are chockfull of magical imagery that blurs the waking and dream life.” —Denise Duhamel, author of Queen for a Day and Kinky
“Looking for the order within disorder, Timothy Green would “wake the body from its only available dream.” Green appreciates how strange this order can be, and that the extraordinary is the hallmark of the individual. In these poems, a man auctions his forehead as ad space, cutlery rains from the sky, spiders devour their mother: in other words, here is life.” —Bob Hicok, author of This Clumsy Living