About the Book
Marc Vincenz proposes, through multiple forms and genres, a paradoxical and parodic archaeology of the future. Irønclad displays verbal and graphic artifacts which serve as evidence of time's entanglement in a 'future present.' Conducting the reader through strata of co(s)mic imagination, Vincenz revises Pound's dictum 'make it new' to one more suited to a nonlinear vision of history: 'make it mysterious, archaic, infinite.' With wickedly subversive wit, the poet excavates the hole, the null set, at the center of meaning, there to discover the very source of invention.
About the Author :
Marc Vincenz is a multilingual translator, poet, fiction writer, journalist, editor, musician and artist. He has published many books of poetry, fiction and translation. His recent poetry collections include The Pearl Diver of Irunmani, A Splash of Cave Paint, The King of Prussia is Drunk on Stars, Faery Ecology, and forthcoming in 2026 from White Pine Press, No More Animal Poems. His translation of award-winning Swiss poet and novelist, Klaus Merz' selected poems, An Audible Blue, won the 2023 Massachusetts Book Award for Translated Literature. He translates from the German, Romanian, French and Spanish. Jake Quatt is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Minneapolis currently working in illustration, printmaking, animation, and shadow puppetry. Jake received his B.A in Fine Arts and Journalism from Beloit College in 2019 and moved to Minneapolis in early 2020. He currently illustrates for MadHat Press, Unlikely Books, and Spuyten Duyvil, animates for the Science Museum of Minnesota, and puppeteers with The Heart of the Beast Theatre. He is currently collaborating with Marc Vincenz on a graphic novel entitled Coalition No. 9. He can be found on Instagram @jake_quatt_arts.
Review :
Marc Vincenz proposes, through multiple forms and genres, a paradoxical and parodic archaeology of the future. Irønclad displays verbal and graphic artifacts which serve as evidence of time's entanglement in a 'future present.' Conducting the reader through strata of co(s)mic imagination, Vincenz revises Pound's dictum 'make it new' to one more suited to a nonlinear vision of history: 'make it mysterious, archaic, infinite.' With wickedly subversive wit, the poet excavates the hole, the null set, at the center of meaning, there to discover the very source of invention.
-Andrew Joron
At once archaeology, geology, and alchemy, Ironclad delves into human memory, precisely that memory of things that never quite were. The Biblical expression, ככתוב, as it is written, resonates throughout this intricate cast-iron lacery of the sacred, the mythical, the primordial, somehow unfrozen and revived by the poet's molten ink. I enjoin all readers in search of poetry to scour these arcane bibliographies. Return always to the moldering and indelible pages of Her Immaculate Book of Slag. Return; haunt the strange back streets of the City of Ø, the null-metropolis where nothing lurks, and where, on every empty street corner, no one whispers the forgotten enchantments for which we still yearn.
-Alexander Dickow, author of Appetites and Caramboles
Marc Vincenz's newest book, Ironclad, a novel within a poetry collection plumbing a fictitious archaeological dig, is anything but ironclad. Yet, what is Ironclad except conjecture? Or as Vincenz writes, "Rearview reductionism / is what it has been coined." The reader unearths societies, artifacts, histories told through graffiti on the underside of an accountant's iron desk, a dentist's alabaster stool and on a scroll wrapped around a bear's shinbone. Who were they? What did they worship? From where did they come and where did they go? Ironclad has the capture of mythic mind and is attuned to recurring global conundrums; pre-diluvian correctionalism, Promethean transference, modern absurdity..., how to be a part and apart? As the novel's archeologist digs, you, reader, are gifted a spade. Conjure.
-Aby Kaupang, author of & there's you still thrill hour of the world to love
