In The Blink Of A Third Eye
Poetry, flash-fiction, drawing-collages
Valery Oisteanu
ISBN 978-1-952419-24-9 116 pages $30.00
Welcome to the logbook and surreal voyage of Valery Oisteanu, a relentless and rewardingly dada poet of New York—and the world. Valery has put a lot of new miles on the old, his surreal sneakers are in good working order, and in this collection he continues to demonstrate his patented ability to erase the border between the interior and the exterior worlds. In The Blink Of A Third Eye, geographic and psychic boundaries expand, contract, invert, explode on themselves, disappear and re-emerge in humbled abasement. So many delightful journeys in this little book to tag along on. From the market-shadows of the Kasbah and winds of the Tuareg Sahara to the troubled climes of Mt Fuji. From the city of Naples and its ghosts bickering, to the unnamed dunes of no return. From the surly madman selling sunglasses on Mario Cesariny Street to Garibaldi walking small dogs in Washington Square Park. Read here NYC’s underground of distorted memories. Read here fond tributes to gone dada peers and world-class poetry masters, immortalized beyond their poignant memorializing. Read here poems conjured like the moon, poems which accelerate the blood, poems like bubbles of dada oxygen in a barren land. Read this book, and Valery Oisteanu’s spell-casting magic will blossom upon you.
George Wallace, Writer in residence, Walt Whitman Birthplace
Valery Oisteanu took the Lower East Side to Morocco in this color-suffused book and brought it back still redolent and alive, something we need badly as the glass walls of the evil corporate prison squeeze the life out of us. Take this book with you just in case you run into Satan.”
Andrei Codrescu, author of No Time Like Now: New Poems
Whether looking for an “upright piano housing giant locust-bees,” a “red flock of birds to the lunar eclipse, or the “loneliness of a lost horseshoe,” look no further than the East Village’s resident dada surrealist, Valery Oisteanu. To be read by third eyes only.
Bob Holman poet, author of The Unspoken
In a prolific dozen books of poetry spanning no less than 50 years, Valery Oisteanu has distinguished himself as a poet of great exuberance and a down-to-earth sensibility of humor. With his latest, In the Blink of a Third Eye, he has reached the heights as a performance poet extraordinaire. Here are just a few of his metaphoric leaps: A captive whale silently chanting poems… A Zeppelin flying against a solid darkness… A train whimpers in the distance… he was riffing: In the end in the end/Over and over: In the end, in the end… in remembering the poet Steve Dalachinsky at his last reading. And my favorite of all, Valery’s most autobiographical poem, “Becoming Invisible,” a true somersaulting of the language. His poems literally jump off the page in the blink of an eye. He continues to astonish his audience.
Gerard Malanga, poet & photographer
Review in Rain Taxi
by Stash Luczkiw
