The Gathering

“I haven’t seen any recent writing like Bloor’s The Gathering. It’s a collection of forty-one poems, each titled ‘Canto’—and it stands up well under the weight that repeated title brings to bear. The poem enacts an expansive present moment in which everything (and anything) happens at once. With enormous patience and precision, Bloor tells us that ‘The seed is milled, its oil added to Galaxie Eggless/Mayonnaise’ and also that ‘A neutron star rips open, emits gamma rays, ionizes earth’s atmosphere.’ That last sentence I quote is not a conclusion; it is surrounded by others detailing daily life, life in the distant past, and life in a high-tech virtual future. Each is rendered in detail and given equal weight. This book is an ambitious tour-de-force bringing to mind (my mind at least) the work of Ezra Pound, Ron Silliman, and Lyn Hejinian. I admire it greatly.”

-- Rae Armantrout, author of "Go Figure"

“The Gathering invents a ginormous universe of contemporary life, nature, philosophy, and time. In a series of cantos, non sequiturs form a deliberate chaos that, taken wholly, invent a brilliant tour de force of reality. In one, someone sees a mountain blow away like sand. In another, cave lions emerge from the Siberian permafrost and, in the next instant, someone falls asleep with a hot water bottle on her chest. Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein might be among this collection’s antecedents, but Bloor is her own wild genius.”

-- Jane Miller, author of "From the Valley of Bronze Camels: A Primer, Some Lectures, & A Boondoggle on Poetry"

“With a subtle yet ample authority, Bloor's The Gathering proposes a wholly contemporary and, to me, wholly convincing vision of our human circumstance. All the persons and occasions of these poems are sites of a conflict between Spirit and Information, between Mythos and Techne. And at stake in the conflict is the very substance of reality. It is a fair portion of Bloor's genius to sustain the risks with neither hope nor despair obscuring them. There is a fearsome courage here.”

-- Donald Revell, author of "Canandaigua"

“Thank God for a book of poems in which the speaking voice is no longer singular but disseminated into ten thousand cranial nerves, each flowing as a vivid river. A polyphonic, planetary, Anthropocene epic, reading The Gathering is like standing before a vast mural—magnificent, inexhaustible, impossible to hold all at once. Instead, it envelops the reader, undoing the illusion of scale and mastery, until one ‘twists his body to open his palms, his mouth.’”

-- Shangyang Fang, author of "Burying the Mount