Phantom Pains of Madness

By Noelle Kocot

• Description
• Reviews

• Noelle Kocot recalls a break with reality that occurred a decade and a half ago in vivid, raw language, one word per line. The resulting slender columns are sharply focused and intense. There's a cult following for her unique imagination, self-professed in a poem as “filled with pulchritude and peopleness,” and her seventh collection does not disappoint.

• Kocot follows Soul in Space with a collection that should further confirm some readers’ views of her as a visionary poet called to despair or ecstasy, delight or shame, by forces beyond her control.
  Publishers Weekly
  
  

  As faith in language and in God weave in and out of possibly skewed perceptions, what object of desire could be so unwavering as to provide satisfaction? [Phantom Pains of Madness] ends with the image of a light green bug hopping from “word / into / sun.” So, too, does Kocot hop through language—into the self, into want, into God, and into whimsy, desire, and beauty.
  Erin Lyndal Martin, Tarpaulin Sky
  
  The book pushes forward one foot at a time in the most literal poetic sense. And therein enters this sense that life is unfolding. There is no need for rigidity. Kocot has learned to parse the planet and her world one unit at a time. This is the most appealing and noteworthy part of the book. A commitment, to never falter from the solution and layout to the work. In this, the connection can be seen between Phantom Pains and the human experience and the way in which quality art moves us between.
  Benjamin Champagne, NewPages