All Through Your Multiple Selves

All Through Your Multiple Selves by Blake Hamilton is made of haunting poems that are in dialogue with themselves on the virtues of chaos and order, and the disorienting, erotic, lonely, and yearning patterns they make when they come together in the same body, through multiple selves. The narrator, or narrators, experience hauntings, vanishings, silence, ecstasy, music, need, grief, and a sense that he is reliving his own prismatic life forwards and backwards, that time is both stretched to infinity and also collapsing into this moment. In elegant lyrics, Hamilton never evades the hunger or dread of intimacy and vulnerability, and his language nimbly casts us about through fluid and shifting stages of knowledge, “charging forward, / a body-ocean // burning off / old ambitions.” The quest to know and be known, “My mouth is full of your sleep. / In the roots of my teeth are my indecisions,” animates this collection, though so many encounters leave his narrator(s) rocking between moments of generosity and states of alienation. This is a poet attuned to the possibilities of reincarnation, that all we have is this moment, and to keep opening to it, despite the wounds and scars, is an invitation we were born to, because “everything is exposed / everything has a name.”신 선 영Sun Yung Shin is a poet, writer, and healer. She is the author or editor of six books, most recently the award-winning poetry/essay collection Unbearable Splendor. “Blake Hamilton has created divine footnotes on the big spaces and the little spaces that we traverse in a lifetime. In these short poems, Hamilton saturates his human experience into fast-moving frames of honesty that hit hard and leave the best kind of bruises. This is an excellent first collection from a new and refreshing voice.”   --- Brice Maiurro, Poetry Editor for Suspect Press and Author of Hero Victim Villain Blake Edward Hamilton holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Naropa University, and currently teaches college English. His work has appeared in World Literature Today Magazine: Windmill, NPR, The Guerrilla Literary Magazine, The Bombay Gin Literary Journal, Punch Drunk Press, and SoboGhoso Press, among others. He frequently travels, spending his time between the deserts of New Mexico and Paris, France as often as possible.