ironclad

Marc Vincenz proposes, through multiple forms and genres, a paradoxical and parodic archaeology of the future. Ir¸nclad 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, ××ת××', 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 , 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