Tuesday, January 29, 2008



review of Donato Mancini's Aethel--

"A gorgeous collection of concrete poetry, Aethel uses a variety of fonts and spatial layouts, contrasting and shifting between each piece. Each poem presents a new jumble of text, an arrangement of letters and fonts shaped into amorphous bursts on the page. Each work is imbued with a certain grace, a rounded beauty that leaks from one age of the page to the next. The more eye catching pieces are the ones like “Blood of a Concrete Poet” and “I Think Therefore I’m Not Sure” that use the American Sign Language hand diagrams and brief arrows as a unique way to portray movement and construct new phrases from visual matter..."