Binding: Paperback
Pages: 156

ISBN: 978-0-9997028-7-1

Billie Chernicoff is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Minor Secrets, (Black Square Editions, 2022) and Amoretti (Lunar Chandelier Collective, 2020).

Minor Secrets by Billie Chernicoff

$20.00

Exhilarating freedom and subtle command, lyric surprise and an electric movement of mind—all that and more runs through every line of Billie Chernicoff’s Minor Secrets. The erotic splendor of her
theologies and the ferociously gentle magic of her music yield a strange and ancient newness, as fresh as anything in American poetry today.
The suites of poems, and single gems, in Billie Chernicoff’s Minor Secrets test and fuse elegy, flirtation, quest, and prayer. They tryst with visual and literary artists, Greek and Babylonian myth, fairy tales and Marian Christianity, the Tarot and the Torah. Formally diverse, playing across language and languages, the poems sound the depths of what makes us human, “bead by fragrant bead,” with delicacy and force. Like all portals (and good poems) they “terrify, incite and caress us, rejoice and pray with us, now and in the hour of our death.”
Elicited from the spirit of everything in the available world, or perhaps with the availability of everything in the spirit world, either way, Chernicoff’s quartzose-lirico fantasies emphasize that “[a]
landscape, / even a face, depends / on having been / dreamed, / dream comes first.” This face being yours and only yours: “[N]o one can see everything yet.” Yet, Billie, let’s meet among the cobras of eloquence “[t]o turn a word / into another, say, / vase to wave.” Billie, Calliope, wave, lunar energy, with the hand of the Muse, I love this blue realm you’ve conducted with your flaming pencil, your intuition for the prior chrysalis of linguality, and your chaotic cosmological card games. You augment the glistening of “unsayable flowers,” in all the “oneiric intervals,” like a lover who knows everything, swimming as fluently as the owl speaks.
No one has ever written like Billie Chernicoff nor will anyone ever. Billie doesn’t even write like Billie. That’s because she introduces us to the nature of poetry in the fact of its utter presence to mind-body-spirit-soul in direct singularity. You feel an actual presence of her Poet at every moment, far in excess of any person you can claim to know or have read. After each reading her poems remain further unread. If she herself met her Poet unannounced there would be more startle than recognition. In fact, her poems are such moments of startle by super-recognition, as if one were witnessing a birth. In a state of wonder one asks, who, what being can now be?

Off the Park Press, Inc.

Minor Secrets by Billie Chernicoff

Peter Cole

Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr.

Carlos Lara

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