About the Book
With All the Tricks of Language, Marc Vincenz has indeed mastered all the tricks: lyric, rhetorical, metaphoric, 'the tinkle of irony, ' drama, comedy-pages filled with people starry as themselves, meeting here on the other side of history as well as this side: 'the world intertwined with the unworld', 'an ocean of unimaginable secrets.' All the Tricks of Language is fertile and carnivalesque, grabbing your attention from the very start. Vincenz writes like no one else, vitally original with, perhaps Stevens, Pound, Kafka, and Calvino in the background, along with a handful of Language poets.Words and phrases bubble up from a magma, forming a molted coherence, a dynamic structure, a natural order. The meaning Vincenz creates is as far from prose reduction as possible, making for 'a provision of epiphanies'. Language itself is a realm, where narrative digs in and picks up. People float up and fade, rise elsewhere. Indeed, 'if we were following all the rules of scripture, by now all would be dead.' Instead, all is very much alive. The scripture created is deeply ironic while engaged at the same time. Irony creates continuity, new meanings and forms to carry them, a kind of Hegelian dialectic: 'there's more to the story than that.'The mind, for example, in the poem, "In a History of Half-light," works in the quotidian, translating, transforming, thus making it more of itself. This is a dynamic, gnomic world, a full-bodied manifesto: 'Everything which is transforming/will continue.' I am convinced from the beginning, and, 'follow the carrot in [in the poet's] hand'. The only stick there is, in the manner of the Zen master, is a sharp tap to the side of the head: Wake up! A deeply impressive, engaging, supremely original work of art.
-Brian Swann
Review :
The first thing to occur to me upon reading All the Tricks of Language is wanting to go back and read each poem again, and again, and again, because it felt so good. The words clicked into place like the gears of a clock, sonic subtleties combined with the vivid, tactile imagery of a theatrum mundi. This is the work of a seasoned poet, with a bit of the bricklayer in him. Phanopoeia spread with a trowel. Flashes of linguistic splendor, tastefully muted by an overarching sense of decorum, illumine particularities of truth, the manifest beauty of things in themselves 'tricked into breathing.' -John Olson
All The Tricks of Language-that title glitters, disappears into itself, and ushers in a wild and meticulous poetics of forward motion. Vincenz is a dancemaster who understands that we exist against terrific odds. There's a chord of tears and laughter, an intimate knowledge of our vulnerability: 'the sinful and awkward under the lion's gaze'. The architecture of this book is vertiginous. Background becomes foreground, foreground is open to the night sky. Vincenz has a dazzling wit and a great eye for the contingent, the perishable, the hue of a damselfly's eye. All The Tricks Of Language is a book like no other-a bravura tour de force, a sui generis structure, a volley of arrows shot into the unknown. -D. Nurkse
Marc Vincenz has done it again! In All the Tricks of Language, he gives his readers a hybrid wonder.... A play starring Denise Levertov and Sylvia Plath and Pessoa and John Donne. A lyric suite. A pastiche. An epic complete with a descent into the Underworld. A prayer for all the sentient beings on this planet. An ode to our pipes and man made marvels. All the Tricks of Language is a remarkable feat from an assiduous wordsmith who builds a world like no other. -Denise Duhamel
Marc Vincenz's All the Tricks of Language conjures a panoply of sentient beings, including-yet not excluding-the Norse god Freyr, Fernando Pessoa, and torpor trapped beneath fish scales. These poems journey across space and time, through and under plants and planets, and into variations of life forms. Concurrently, the poems sing to beloved ghosts and dreamers, and, extraordinarily, the poet collects the echoes of these ghosts, offering them, too, to us. Such magical worlds materialize through the curtain of the poet's material, which is language, due to his sheer virtuosity. -Martine Bellen
