Ishmael Mask

Charles Kell's second collection of poems considers the instability of identity through fictional and religious characterswhile tackling issues of addiction, incarceration, and loss. In Ishmael Mask, Charles Kell reminds us that identity is precarious. Kell's collection is a collage of the journeys and interior lives of various wanderers-from Ishmael, the son of Hagar, to Melville's Ishmael, and from Pierre of The Ambiguities to Pierre Guyotat. Each poem strips back the mask and beckons us to witness humanity in its barest forms. Captain Ahab's leg, Ishmael's arm, and Pierre's severed head serve as invitations to consider hunger and hope. The inspirations behind these poems-the Bible, Heraclitus, Melville, Guyotat, Toma alamun-are transformed by Kell, conjuring dreamscapes both dazzling and haunting. Ishmael Mask masterfully allows a glimpse into the human experience of feeling lost-even when right at home, even in our own bodies.

About the Author :
Charles Kell is the author of Ishmael Mask and Cage of Lit Glass, winner of the 2018 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize, selected by Kimiko Hahn. He is an Assistant Professor of English atCommunity College of Rhode Island's Flanagan campus and associate editor ofThe Ocean State Review.

Review :
"Kell’s flinty, ironic, fatalist tone is lyrically apprehensive and well-matched to detailing the mask of maleness—the strength and importance, pain and brutality, and power struggles among men and within 'every / man' . . . Impossible reflection, dear readers, is where love and art intersect, where Kell’s mix of narrative and absurdist poems live their lives in words both 'deeply felt' and 'unfeeling.' But this presents a 'false dichotomy,' reminding us 'that one can draw / loss, draw frost without anyone knowing.' When reading Kell’s 'sensualist' poems I encounter a poet willing to allow all aspects of self to become 'unmoored,' even unmasked." "In Ishmael Mask, Kell asks us to consider our existence, not in the context of a physical and metaphorical cage we might free ourselves from, but in the context of our wanderings through an often surreal, ultimately unknowable landscape. The literary characters who accompany him become subsumed into collection’s searching self, fellow companions whose creators he freely borrows from. They pull him back from the abyss and provide a frame to temper chaos. In Kell’s hands, the act of art-making becomes the means by which we embrace our deep sense of connectedness. . . .  Ishmael Mask explores obsession, passion, and absurdity, leading us to the edge of the abyss. When we arrive, rather than falling, we revel." “We Americans are all imaginary orphans, forever seeking a new name, a new carapace, and the further adventure. ‘Call me Ishmael’ is thus a motto more proper to our republic, and more forward-looking, than ‘E Pluribus Unum.’ In Ishmael Mask, Kell has parsed the fossil record of our orphancy in beautiful and unguarded detail; he has adventured much and withheld nothing. For those who come to poetry in search of a credible future, Kell will prove to be a true and unfailingly honest companion.” “How does one hammer memory onto the page without nails or bullets? Kell wails his own mnemonic siren through the literary specter of Herman Melville’s Pierre, Kafka, etc., and we wail with him like a stone who can easily weep, but we don’t. There is touchless erection in this book and drowning and death and suicide and a ‘rat runs in small circles where the green hat used to lie’ and may suggest life and pain and existential revisitations have cast shadows that are bigger than meadows. Perhaps in this collection Kell is yelling from the top of his lungs, but all we could hear is wind and January or ‘black, red, green spiral of smoke.’ Or perhaps Kell and his poetry are a cellar we all wish we could descend into to grab mason jars of beauty and grace in times of existential hunger and famine.” “Poetry is rarely so vividly an art of the face to face as it is in Kell's Ishmael Mask: the faces of the dead, the faces in the mirror, the faces of the lover, blurred by presence and distance. These poems, shadowed by Melville and Kafka, are also a history of one poet's encounters with the inscrutable relentlessness of fate and the inevitable privacy of suffering. ‘One can draw loss, draw frost, without anyone knowing,’ he writes. Yet knowing here becomes his reader's privilege, an unveiling slowly emerging through the voice of his haunting, indelible, lines.”