Poetry | $10

Perfect-bound, 41 pages,

7 black-and-white images, 7 x 8 in.

Wichman Cometh promo by Bianca Stone

 

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“You need not have grown up with Han Solo to get into Wichman Cometh. A weaker writer might have left the reader grasping or left them responsible for all the referential heavy lifting. Ben weaves these media milestones into the life posts of the Wichman, wandering through life on Earth and in space. The language instantly resonates with the fractured narrative through the prisms of his cultural sources [. . .] The bottom line is that Ben is doing with this project exactly what poetry can do best, that no other medium can approach, historically and contemporaneously.” —LEVI RUBECK, BOMBLOG

“Pease straddles more than fantasy and realism. He braids the ancient and modern, the genre blockbuster and metaphysical contemplation, and art and prose and enjambed verse. Make no mistake, however: this is not crossover stuff. Pease did not dilute his artistry down to vapid pop. His concept is rich and his imagery is groundbreaking, smart. All storytelling, to some degree, is the output of the undying myth engine. John Ford’s newspaperman runs that engine. Homer runs that engine. Twain oils that engine late into the night. As writers, we might borrow and revise archetypes from the myth engine, especially if we are working within genre. Pease’s Wichman cometh straight from the humming myth machine itself.” —DAWN MARIE KNOPF, THE FASTER TIMES

 

IV. It was not unusual for many people’s tolerance of alcohol to reach a point where they could see but no longer read; regrettably, it was the opposite for The Wichman. He craved lucidity though it was beyond him: he wished not just to master but to have such a complete domain over it he would seem its creator, its copyright holder: The Wichman would sue your ass if you even considered having a lucid thought of your own. Unfortunately, The Wichman was all talk, all ancient sound abstract on black interior monologue, yet an unharnessed joie de vivre dwelled within. The Wichman lined his desk with dollhouse-sized busts of Apollo he found in the trash. The Wichman could not bear anyone, even if made of stone in one-quarter scale, gazing out at him the same way the bluebirds and cardinals on his windowsill eyed him as if he were a moving concoction of suet and sun-flower seed. The Wichman nonetheless with a sense he was on the verge of becoming his own little person, desired to flex his guns or be wronged in some way to justify a more errant manner of behaving.

Ben Pease is the creator and host of Scattered Rhymes, the featured podcast of The The Poetry Blog. His poetry has appeared in MAGGY, Paperbag, notnostrums, and SUPERMACHINE, among others. He is the author of Wichman Cometh, a selection of his Blockbuster in Verse, Chateau Wichman. His collages can be found here , and as poetry comics with Bianca Stone here and here .