No Material by Losarc Raal

“In the full light of the world, I have actively hated the isolation of signs. But I’ve saved many lives with such. Dark waves of prey commingle with certain sleeves of risk, playing with the works of blessed zipper beds. The light inside the skull pains me. And its 69 drugs of tormented Aprille. No one cares for the air’s animal disease. Now there are pure telescopes of occluded memory, pears from purity’s errors. As sure as the carpentry starts in flagrant emerald beings.”

Praise for No Material

“Losarc Raal’s poetic notebook is most welcome today when an irreverent, asubjective poetics of modernist-surrealist stripe has been all but silently escorted from the premises of North American poetry, with evil flowers subordinated to a pseudo-left personal, political, or environmentalist moralism. With a vocabulary more alarmingly varied than entire shelves of contemporary verse, this manual against all pieties hammers the conspiracy of marketable somethings. You know nothing of the extreme force of this terrible rupture.”

—David Lau, author of Still Dirty

“In No Material, Lorsac Raal. Animatronic graham cracker crust. Lorca Rasal. Show me a rose or leave me alone. Aral Calors. The man who died on television planned to live to be a hundred. Oral Sacral. Viral liverwurst as far as an ass caught in neckwear. Loala Scarr. I wrote at least ten letters. Rascal Rola. Catch me in your inner nest. Lora Scraal. Suddenly impactful mathematical radical. Arc Sallaro. This is not up for debate. Carla Solar. An accidental overdose overdoes it. Cola Larras. Missing masked singer sewing machine swingline staplegun. Sorral Laca. Press the wrong button for the right reason. Carra Llaso. Alright, let’s go, you guys. Caral Alors. Alla Carros. Oscar Ralla.”

—Garrett Caples, author of Lovers of Today

“Does anyone writing now, or even recently, make English sound so bristingly and kinetically alive? I don’t think so. No one else is quite the ‘cold ornamental cardboard and rising Teflon god’ that Raal undeniably is. Maybe if Keston Sutherland were also a Mean Girl TM, or if Ashbery had listened to trap music, but still, probably not. It’s an oddly Bretonian kind of Post-Futurism full of question marks. It’s Tristan Tzara and Unica Zürn and Amiri Baraka and Sir Philip Sidney and Osvaldo Lamborghini and Rimbaud and… Saddam Hussein(?), to name just a few of the many compatriots Raal invokes. No Material is a densely mobile textile woven of ‘extremity and logistics’—a gorgeous nightmare tornado of ‘cutlery for the unbroken ursine voice strand.’ Raal’s ‘I,’ like most everyone living in the landscape its language derives from, is seduced by the terrible ‘imperial beauty becoming even more beautiful,’ as it takes dynamic shape in the language-world around it: we might well see this ‘I’ as ‘the extremest pet of a lapidary dayglow,’ ‘at the MoMA drinking Budweiser out of a candelabra.’ But if this ‘I,’ whirlingly couched among the ‘supine glimmering restrooms,’ knows that ‘a customer inhabits everyone I see,’ it is also making itself out of the very fabric of this problem: how to live with the true and undeniable ‘ongoing sapphire’ aliveness that impels it (‘the levitation is fine’!), in a landscape littered with ‘eggs of long, derivative, slave-ship-type-of-finance,’ ‘wearing the right-wing aspirin being alive.’ Is ‘no material’ the answer? Hard to say: the patio furniture breaks down into firewood, and the cigarette goes out. But Raal finds a way to stay with this true (and therefore irresolvable) question, to actually be there, wherever or whatever that is, in this book.”

—Kirsten (Kai) Ihns, author of sundaey

Losarc Raal is a writer and editor originally from Varna, Bulgaria. He is the author of the chapbooks: [SELF-SELECTIONS] (Trainwreck Press, 2021), The Poetry of Carlux Carluxlax (Reverse Catfish, 2022), and The Adverse Keys (Spiral Editions, 2022). A pamphlet, Dead or Alive (The Creative Writing Department), was published in 2022. He was tyrant over the poetry and arts journal NOMATERIALISM (2020–2022). He is currently composing a book of prose poems entitled NOTHING. He has lived in Brooklyn, Greece, Argentina, and Saudi Arabia, and he currently resides with his wife and sons in Los Angeles, CA. Hit him at losarcraal@gmail.com or Instagram @nomaterial_ism.

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