Sandy Florian

Bio

Of Colombian and Puerto Rican decent, I was born in New York and raised in Latin America. I am the author of Telescope (Action Books), 32 Pedals & 47 Stops (Tarpaulin Sky Press), The Tree of No (Action Books), Prelude to Air From Water (Elixir Press), and On Wonderland & Waste (Sidebrow Press). I've been awarded residencies at Caldera Arts, Stonehouse, and the Vermont Studio Center as well as literary prizes from Elixir Press, New Voices, and Brown University. I currently live in San Francisco where I am an affiliate artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts and teach writing classes at the Hayes Valley Writing Center. I also work as one of the "other" editors for Tarpaulin Sky Journal.

Interviews

Read an interview conducted by Duncan Barlow, editor of Astrophil Press and author of Super Cell Anemia here.

Look forward to a forthcoming interview conducted by Robert Savino Oventile, author of on COIN, copper nickel online.

Prelude to Air From Water

PRELUDE TO AIR FROM WATER is out and available from Elixir Press, Small Press Distribution, and Amazon.

In a careful choreography of repeatedly missed 'moments,' the familiar characters of Florian's latest collection weave in and out of each other's lives sheathed in a postmodern isolation that keeps actual contact at bay. In them, we see ourselves, misreading, misinterpreting, or just plain missing all the signs--but not without humor, and a tenderness that makes them fully human. A primer for 21st-century relations. COLE SWENSON

An enthralling sequence of poems, Sandy Florian’s playfully uncanny Prelude to Air from Water anatomizes moments in time through which a menagerie of characters wander, pursuing and fleeing their desires, often lost to themselves, but always set in sharp, revealing profile for the reader, whom Florian moves to compassion yet also to an irreversible meditation on the intensities of feeling, wonder, and self-confrontation each moment hosts and elides. As readers of Florian’s Telescope and The Tree of No should expect, poetic invention and searching thought fuse in Prelude with astonishing results. ROBERT SAVINO OVENTILE

In Prelude to Air From Water, Sandy Florian deftly manipulates the countries between the prose poem and the experimental lyric. Better to call this a novel in verse where the trajectory of the prose poem is punctuated with experiments in language. The literary descendant of Gertrude Stein and Baudelaire, Florian plays a bluntly meaningful and still elusive music. Prelude to Air From Water is a symphony in declaratives where the abstraction of a 'Moment' appears as a character and sets up poetic associations that are playful and sublime. JAY SNODGRASS

THE TREE OF NO

is now available through Action Books - http://www.actionbooks.org

Art and design by Gent Sturgeon and Tia Resleure.

"As slyly humorous as it is sublimely poetical, Florian’s experimental novel riffs on Biblical stories from Genesis to Revelations to trace the career of a narrator who, unhesitant 'to taste the waste,' ventures forth from Eden to pursue meditations on imagination, quirky civic projects, and an odd love affair with the enigmatic Montgomery, all the while struggling toward a resolute affirmation of the earthbound self." Robert Savino Oventile

"'Beastly I fall at Adam under the shade.' Sandy Florian's second book dilates under Milton's Forbidden Tree, plumbing God's unjustifiable ways, and Man's. In a world made from scratch, eros and artifice, thanatos and theology give off mixed and exquisite signals, here buckled in Florian's bejeweled and rigorous sentences: 'words like chords like emerald snakes, words like lords like humble smoke.' Florian's intellect blazes in this bold, ambitious work: 'I have a war with history.'" from the publishers

Excerpts from the The Tree of No appear in bird dog, /nor, Tarpaulin Sky, Gulf Coast, Upstairs at Duroc, Octopus, A_Handsome Journal, and Fairy Tale Review.