PAOLO JAVIER is the author of 60 lv bo(e)mbs (O Books), and the time at the end of this writing (Ahadada), which received a Small Press Traffic Book of the Year Award. He lives in New York.

Nick Carbo writes that Javier is "an engaging young talent who will hook you with his meaty metaphors and feed you textual acrobats, visual tremblors, and lingual pleasures."

What Others Say

• Click here for full reviews from Ricepaper Magazine & Terminal city

'One of Paolo Javier's poems is four words: "the words/the space". In The Time at the End of This Writing, the words are ahead of the time they're actually in at present” throughout. Paolo Javier makes words be beside images or beside spaces & equality and separation of space and image and word that's a 3-D sculpture wherein the courting lover always in bed and out in NYC flies up to his intended and appears to be Paolo Javier (translated as say Berrigan). By the end of the writing, that person is apparently someone over fifty with some other given life in place (whereas Paolo Javier is young, in his twenties), the someone over fifty not a character or 'voice' as ventriloquism but ventriloquism of space and words that undo and at once heighten the previous spaces new like pressing the lips to the page.'

    —Leslie Scalapino

Though he aposteothizes himself as a kind of free zone of writing between the large islands of Jose Garcia Villa and Ted Berrigan, Javier's best poetry is all about youth and its relentless extremism. Thus there's a poem which takes off from the different names by which he is known to many people—the mirror effect of Lacan writ large. I could read this forever and hope someday to meet the lad.

    —Kevin Killian, Third Factory Notes to Poetry

'Paolo Javier may end his book by "submit "-ting to Rilke, Neruda and Berrigan. But not with a bowed head. He submits to Poetry's Call and deservedly ascends the crowded shelves with his first book equal to those whose works he imbibed, but then alchemized into his history as a poet. His history as the "Original Brown Boy" Poet.

By forming original poems, Javier subverts the colonialism that imposed a language upon his ancestors. He does so by finding the gold not previously found by other poets whose first language is English.

    —Eileen Tabios, author of 'Reproductions From An Empty Flagpole " (Marsh Hawk Press)

'Paolo Javier's confident, emotionally variable poems work at a point where sensory information runs into the artistic reality of building and negotiating surfaces. But instead of giving in to one force or the other they inhabit the mess that collision makes, insisting that art and life remain tangled up. "I don 't want to be another story, you know? " one asks, knowing story is part of the deal of moving though time at all. These are perceptive poems; that there is pleasure despite it all in never knowing what might happen next is no small part of what they know.'

    —Anselm Berrigan, author of 'Integrity and Dramatic Life', and 'Zero Star Hotel' (Edge Books)

'Hip, sexy, energetic, Paolo Javier gives mad respect to his artistic and poetic predecessors in the time at the end of this writing. His voice is clear and tender, these poems controlled in disruptions of narrative, never falling into obscure terrain. They are skillfully crafted and tight, a pleasure to roll off the tongue and view on the page. This Original Brown Boy has given us a lovely and fierce collection of poems that dismantle how ethnic writers in North America are expected to write. It's about time.'

    —Barbara Jane Reyes, author of Gravities of Center (Arkipelago Books) (Marsh Hawk)

Links

• O Books