The Habiliments
“In one domestic/cosmic sequence, The Habiliments explores the contradictory potentials of lyric poetry—intimate and expansive, broken and fluid, novel as a virus and persistent as a dream. As dreams interrupt, intercut, undermine, and translate the dreaming speaker (does he speak or dream?), we begin to conclude that consciousness is a fabric strung between opposites, beauty an allergic response to irritants. The Habiliments reminds us that, for all our failings as a species, Poetry is our least obnoxious trait.”—Joyelle McSweeney
“Artemidorus of Ephesus wrote that dreams are a movement of the soul, giving hints of good things or bad things to come. In The Habiliments, Joe Milazzo utilizes dream as a method of reentering the past to explain the present, capturing glances of ghosts in fleeting light: ‘I know it, tomorrow I will fall apart into corners and infinitesimals.’ These poems scale and shear the mountains of grief to release those captive spirits and let them live again.”—D. A. Powell
About Joe Milazzo (Dallas, Texas Author)
Joe Milazzo is a writer, editor, educator, and designer. He is the author of the novel Crepuscule W/ Nellie (Civil Coping Mechanisms) and two full-length poetry collections: The Habiliments (Apostrophe Books) and Of All Places In This Place Of All Places (Spuyten Duyvil).
His writings have appeared in Black Clock, Black Warrior Review, BOMB, The Collagist, Prelude, Tammy, Texas Review, and elsewhere.
In addition to co-curating the online interdisciplinary arts journal [out of nothing], he is an Associate Editor at Southwest Review, a Contributing Editor at Entropy, and the proprietor of Imipolex Press. Joe lives and works in Dallas, TX, where he was born and raised.
