Guernica Editions

Stan Rogal’s latest collection, after words, offers a series of scintillating poetic responses to authors and artists from the recent and distant past. Rogal’s sophisticated awareness of poetic possibilities gestures to what happens outside the conventions of language, tilting beyond words, while pursuing after words. Throughout these meta-poetic portrayals, Rogal’s autobiographical narrator inhabits the realms of literary and artistic precursors including Artaud, Atwood, Bogart, Burroughs, Calvino, Cohen, Eliot, Nin, and Shakespeare. A series of brilliant tours-de-force while providing an inspirational tour of the art of words.

If it’s words you’re after, you'll find plenty of fine ones in Stan Rogal’s after words. But be warned: they’re not all pretty and the way they’re put together could be overpowering to the unprepared. I’m reminded of Lautréamont’s caveat in Maldoror, that the reader must become as fierce as what he’s reading or risk being annihilated by it: literature as obliterature. Not to suggest after words isn’t a nuanced work vibrant with wordplay, humour, musicality, atmosphere, and style. It’s that and more, but what impresses most is the vivid carnality of Rogal’s writing. Visceral, muscular, fleshly, and very much alive, this may be the strongest offering yet from the regal rogue of CanLit, the only poet who would unapologetically pay homage to Sylvia Plath and Humphrey Bogart in the same volume, and Albert Camus and Merle Haggard in the same poem.