Please join us for a special reading with Mackie JV Blanton celebrating THE CASUAL PRESENCE OF BORDERS. We are excited to finally be able to host the "launch" of this collection, published by UNO Press without fanfare at the very onset of the pandemic.

    "A virtuoso of word-music, word-play, and allied neologism." —Niyi Osundare

Borders exist in and are occupied by space and time ritualized by seen and unseen, known and unknown, human struggles. Mackie Blanton’s The Casual Presence of Borders captures borders present around denizens or friends gathered at bars or over coffee, over new births, over silence and meals; at nearby places of worship or warfare or death; or unvisited planets or islands of our knowledge or imagination; or the sensed presence of the cells and arteries of the human body; and human beings noticed in easy chairs, in backyards across fences, or caught crossing in woods, swamps, bridges. Blanton is driven by two concepts: the protection of fiction inhabiting poems and a guiding principle of a post-contemporary sensibility that slips through and away from modernism and postmodernism to grasp elsewhere a possible unfamiliar, hardly quite there yet, future.

Mackie J.V. Blanton (M.S., Ph.D. in Linguistics at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL) has written essays on linguistics, poetics, scientific and technical discourse, Louisiana dialects, and Sufi and Hasidic sacred languages. His current research in Critical Theory Linguistics analyzes the nature and structure of thought as a Sacriture suggested by subtle, often subconscious thought experiments or contemplative thinking underlying the meditative practice of language in scientific discourse and literary expression. Dr. Blanton has traveled extensively in North Africa, East Africa, West Africa, Europe, and Asia Minor. He is a native New Orleanian.