Introducing Cadenza (&: Welcome to Knock)
Dear songbirds, the grazioso era has come to a close—& what a beautiful era it's been, with the introduction of Half Mystic Press, Half Mystic Journal's highest selling issue yet, & our very first real life launch at BooksActually. Thank you all endlessly for the light & song you've shared with us over these past six months, for singing in sun-language, for reimagining this creation into every tender dreaming form you know how to hold. We do not take any of it for granted.
& so, as we close Issue IV & look forward into 2018, the HM team lower our heads. We turn to the gold-blue horizon, roomy & bright & melodic. & this is the creature we find -
cadenza.
(the clumsy dance - the saxophone laugh - the air of smoke & blue - the love affair as old fashioned as it is timeless.)
Cadenza is a musical term meaning an improvised flourish at the end of a longer jazz piece. It embodies movement, spontaneity, twirling with closed eyes & open arms. Send us your best writing & music. We can't wait to experience your magic.
As well, if you don't follow HM on social media (though really, you should remedy that!), you may not know that our debut collection of poetry from Half Mystic Press is coming out this March. We are so delighted & honoured to share that Knock by Melissa Atkinson Mercer is now open for preorders. It will be delivered to your doorstep on March 1st.
Emari DiGiorgio, author of The Things a Body Might Become & Girl Torpedo, said of the book: “The incantatory poems in Melissa Atkinson Mercer’s Knock ‘speak miracle and rage,’ insistent as daybreak or high tide. Mercer entreats: ‘darling, listen: the tongue is the shape of a door.’ These poems are reclamation spells that celebrate and reassemble the untamed, the ‘witch heart,’ the ‘undarkened bell’ of speech: where ‘mountains are the tongues of women buried for the sin of lust’ and ‘the sea is the tongue of the woman who loved kings.’ As elegiac as it is visionary, this collection invokes a ‘matriarchal oath’ to bless the darkness inside and around us.”
& Cynthia Atkins, author of In the Event of Full Disclosure, said: “The haunting and lucid speakers in Melissa Atkinson Mercer’s Knock are at once testimonial, song and portent to the psyche’s anguished interiors, ‘We woke in the wet black heat / to the sad song our mother knew.’ Mercer deftly crafts this maternal lineage with an authentic connection to all the vernaculars of language, palpably casting a light on the impediments of the mind. Mercer’s incantations are arresting at every turn—as the poet confronts each threshold with an uncanny sense of observation, so pristinely rendering the dualities of our enigmatic natures, ‘The world was a small, dark shape & we entered it.’ Artful, fierce and lyrical, these poems cast a spell on the reader indelibly: ‘The first cure for depression is they cut out your tongue; the second is they try to give it back.’ This book took me hostage, released me more alive and enlightened.”
This release is a highly anticipated one, & we are so pleased to be sharing it with you. Do preorder your copy in order to receive it as early as possible - Melissa's words are sunrises & cataclysms, & you don't want to be missing this one.
Dear friends, Issue V: Cadenza & Melissa Atkinson Mercer's Knock are creations that hum with ineffable music in ways that startle us & each other. Submit your writing & music to Issue V, & preorder Knock today. Let's welcome in the New Year & make this era as brilliant & mellifluous as the last. xx