Tinted Steam by Constance Stadler
Cover artist, Steve Viner
Constance Stadler’s new poetry chapbook of metaphysical existentialism. In Tinted Steam, Constance Stadler takes a prism or a stained glass kaleidoscope when viewing her subject, summoning other color-laden aspects come into play, tangential, but important to the pattern. She tackles religion as much as politics, personal intimacy as well as global humanity, the sacred and the profane. Truly amazing. The reader is inspired, ideas pinging all over the place as Stadler handles ideology as deftly as metaphor. She secures the reader with the everyday for, (as if hooking them with a safety line), and then slingshots them into the infinite where they are introduced to intangible imperatives .
Tinted Steam is a numbered limited edition, signed by both the poet, Constance Stadler and the cover artist Steven Viner.
44 pages, 11 poems. Poems include: Voyage, Autumn Eve, The Last Arabian Night, Impotence, Smote, World Geometry, Tinted Steam, Welsh-flecked ‘Romance’,
$6.95 includes shipping within the U.S.
$9.95 international shiping
(please email gail at gail_gray@bellsouth.net paypal buttons don'tt work) payment may also be made by check mailed to Shadow Archer Press, 15 Brookdale Ave. Greenville, SC 29607
Author, Constance Stadler (Winchester, VA) has been writing, publishing, and editing poetry from the 'prehistoric' epoch of print journals to modern e-times. She was formerly an editor for South and West and is currently a contributing editor to the e-zine Eviscerator Heaven. She has published three previous chaps in her poetic 'first life' some twenty years past: Ginger Kiss, Beyond Headwater, and Phoenix Crashing.
Her most recent work appears in such 'zines as ditch, ken*again, Pen Himalaya, Clockwise Cat, Hanging Moss, Neonbeam, Rain Over Bouville, and Gloom Cupboard. As a political anthropologist specializing in North Africa and a violinist, her influences are multiform. Work in formative years with the late poet Gwendolyn Brooks was seminal, but no less so than Sufi Dervish dancers, and the challenges of mastering Bruch's first concerto.
www.conniestadler.blogspot.com
Cover Artist, Steve Viner (Dorset, UK) is predominately a digital artist, using various found and made objects that create very dark gothic images. He is currently working on illustrating a children's book with an already published poet/ author, Petra Whiteley with other projects pending. He has had a successful exhibition, which surprisingly due to the artistic content went well with a broad cross section of people. His work is due to be published in Osprey, The Glasgow Review, Unlikely 2.0. His cover art has been published in the first issue of Deep Tissue Magazine. http://www.myspace.com/visionpig "From the moment I first laid eyes on Constance Stadler’s poetry I knew I was witnessing a new, major force in contemporary poetry and Tinted Steam justifies all such superlatives and then exceeds them. Stadler’s breadth of knowledge, expanse of range, precise prosody and rich, stunning using of language leaves one dazzled. She is the perfect melding of the best of both classic and contemporary poetic forms and devices, creating an art that is truly timeless. Prepare to be amazed. Prepare to read the poetry of Constance Stadler ...." --Antony Hitchin, published in numerous small press and independent journals; Featured Poet at Serious Ink, Guild of Outside Writers, Poetry Warrior "Stadler’s poetry has a unique feel for structure, if her poems were music, they’d be one of the most stunning symphonies composed, were they a building, they’d be architectural wonders like Notre-Dame - as poetry they will stand a similar test of time with their high quality and prolific content. They display poetic as well as emotive richness, and with their breadth and intelligence, it means that they will be remembered long after reading. They are multi-dimensional, they cover and challenge existential, philosophical, cultural themes as well as social conscience confronting the societies she has lived in and studied with a deeply rooted humanistic approach. Her piercing intellect and amazing artistry and unique voice make her work distinctive and inspirational - and important." "To declare Constance Stadler as one of the greatest living poets would not be an extraordinary statement; it can only be said to be involved with the apparent. For in the embodiment of which she possesses, the poet, the illuminator, the constantly aware, Ms. Stadler finds the obvious fault in supposed reality, the reality that is ersatz to the realm of philosophical responsiveness to her environmental and physical state. She, with masterful indulgence into the metaphysical position of observing with a hyper-keen intelligence and innate poetic sensibilities, has created a body of work which stuns and amazes, causing recollection, desire, and scrutiny to be abundant within the responsive and equally aware reader. Tinted Steam is flesh, a living being explaining its movements with a descriptive vernacular. Throughout this finely written collection, a body sits parallel with the reading mind, asserting and requesting empathy, demanding the ear hear the musical connotations, and eventually asks us to rise and walk with this body, formed in written appearance. Indeed, one can juxtapose Ms. Stadler’s Tinted Steam with [absolute] awareness, thus what she has created is a formidable rendition of objects forming a new recognition before our more open eyes. Gratitude is therefore, needed in reciprocation." -- Felino Soriano, author of Among the Interrogated (BlazeVOX [books]) and Feeling Through Mirages (Shadow Archer) -- Christopher Nosnibor, author of The Plagiarist (Clinicality Press), Bad Houses, a Call for Submissions, and C.N. N (with Stewart Bateman)
e-mail: visualpig@yahoo.co.uk "As Constance Stadler herself says in her note to this book, the impulse that illumines these poems is largely existential reassertion of the metaphysical imperative. Now metaphysics utters no imperatives, but existential metaphysics is the history of Being, diachronics as opposed to ontology's synchronics, and what these poems do is attempt to capture Being as it has offered itself, as it has been given by the neutral "Es" that gives, to Constance herself in her life as Constant Traveler, sometimes Constance the Sojourner. They are, or seem to be, about an unpolluted old-fashioned Seyn, and, moving from Araby to ebay, they present a valid move in a poeticizing game whereby the linguistic skills, the facility with language of a Dylan Thomas is conjoined with the theoretical acuity of a deconstructionist anthropologist, which is what she is. In an increasingly faster world, we must absorb our environments fast, and in a few pages this chapbook does that, swirls from Iran to the modern ebay America that is Iran's primitive enemy, it does so in a way that demands and deserves the reader's exquisite attention, it should be compulsoryreading."
-- David Mclean, author of several books, including pushing lemmings (Erbacce), Cadavers dance (Whistling Shade Press), la morte vivante (Shadow Archer Press) and of dead snakes (Rain Over Bouville). "Tinted Steam is a truly remarkable collection which encapsulates everything that is awe-inspiring about Stadler’s poetry. The pieces are possessed of a sense of timelessness, and one feels that one is seeing something ancient, and yet at the same time, wholly new.
