Brilliant Odyssey Don't Yearn // Finn Menzies' Three-Part Exploration

Photo: Janae Lloyd

“colored roses of smoke are growing
around the shacks we used to call
constellations
so we make our hands busy with broken rituals”

The fine folks

over at Fog Machine

sent me a PDF

of the new book

Brilliant Odyssey Don't Yearn

by poet Finn Menzies.

The publication is a poem

written in three parts:

Book of Anatomy,

Book of Body Celestial,

and Book of Apocalypse.

Given the title (B.O.D.Y.)

and the three part

breakdown handled

in 68 pages, it should be

known that Menzies

goes deeply inward,

focusing on the self,

the spirit, the body

as a host, and eventually

spreading outward

and expanding

into a nautical aftermath.

It's a whirlwind of

introspective poetry

with a bounty of lines

I found myself

writing down, like

"the eyeball of starlight /

and human glue /

are cousins" or

"my body // is a midnight

walk / I know why

the moving green shoulders /

of the lake calm me"

or "with these eyes

that take in painted / thoughts

and turn them into stink stew /

of worry and religion"

or "when I get anxious

I only feed my heart snow"

or, or, or.

You can grab

the book of poems

right here

and be sure to check

out more from Fog Machine,

whose experimental release

structure is based around

recommendations and references

from previously published artists.

I wonder who Menzies

will suggest next.

“a woman with a crown of twelve stars came to eat / with us in the woods we told her we would love her. // and then our world opened her mouth and swallowed / the floods and we closed our eyes until we dried out”