Review by Jami Macarty
In his poetry and collage hybrid Self Geofferential, Geoffrey Gatza is poetry’s equivalent of chief cook and bottle-washer. He created the book’s art, writing, design, typesetting, and cover. As he writes in the opening poem “Disappointment Apples”: “Under the unity of naming / I hoped to bridge the gap.” Gatza’s multifaceted artistic vision brings “a new light shining” on expansive and inventive possibilities.
That artistic possibility comes alive in the “gallant colorful celebrations” of his mixed media collages and the “strange melting shadows” of familial trauma stories. Gatza addresses the “biggest littlest sadness” of his childhood by rewriting fables such as “Little Red Riding Hood” and “The Tortoise and the Hare.” Reimagining these stories offers Gatza a medium for a do-over where he can stand up to the abusive parents, “hateful” brothers, and “smug” sisters who did him wrong in his early life. By doing so in art, the “broken story is dragged upwards,” and Gatza salvages painful memories “to be made” into something new.
Gatza’s whimsical collages beautifully complement his self-reflective and tender-hearted poems. The poems make room for a “Birthday Girl” who is a “ruthless schemer,” a friend John who “was trouble,” those “wrongfully convicted suffering in jail,” Emily Dickinson, Clarice the cat, and all “Of those who have come before us and serve as markers of who we are / As people on this strange planet wondering what it is that we are all doing / Here.”
One thing Geoffrey Gatza does while here is celebrate “growing” and making. The reader finds him in the garden with primrose, and “in the kitchen cooking / Using up the bruised peaches for a summertime cobbler.”
Self Geofferential is fresh out of Geoffrey Gatza’s imagination. “Looking for the jointure,” between publisher and artist, collage and poetry, the past and present, the fractured and flourishing, Geoffrey Gatza emerges as a “champion of broken art.”
Self Geofferential by Geoffrey Gatza. BlazeVOX [books], December 2024.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.
