Violet Ideologies

BLURBSViolet Ideologies, David Wyman's second collection, lays out a brilliant spectrum of incongruous ideas. It's ominous yet funny, apocalyptic, but oddly serene, a splice of the beautiful and the monstrous. The result is "a binary like foxglove" where the language of Wall Street is grafted to the poetics of the natural world. It is a book for our times when translating corporate-speak has become almost impossible, and the day's "official transcript gets redacted." Ever get the feeling you've been cheated? Wyman asks, and the answer is evident. Still, he won't stop reminding us there is more to see than spreadsheets and trendy electronica: horses gathered along a stone wall, a pub where poems taste like hard cider, songs sung to infants. Commodified language insists on a mandatory unity, even as lyricism escapes its confines again and again. Can the binary be broken? The book isn't saying.

Lori Lamothe author of Kirlian Effect

In Violet Ideologies, "worn hearts/turn meaning into value." Wyman knows that as sure as authority is constructed, "Landscape is temporary too." Things are held in orbit by the caustic sting of pure feeling. It's never a slow tectonics, but a rapidly shifting reality. Writing to "awakening / to an even greater understanding/of the inner dimensional self" is an uncomfortable benediction.

Jess Mynes author of One Anthem