Death Day Erection

by J. Fisher

Death day erection
last bone thrown
down life’s roadway of lost mileage.

From “Passing on Horse” by J. Fisher

Awards/Award Nominations

Short-listed for Alberta Book Awards: Book Illustration of the Year

Reviews

J. Fisher is the Quintessential counter-culture archetype, a James Dean incarnate… Fisher’s strongest work blends base abstractions with complex allusions. Nevertheless he achieves some dexterous sleights of hand (it’s all in the wrist) and a sense of alienation only the young can cherish. ~Anne Burke, Prairie Journal

(Fisher) draws equally from the wells of Beat, punk, and street vernacular/performance oriented poets like the Renegades, Hip Hoppers, and Nuyorican Café poets. Charles Bukowski, Jim Carroll, and Lou Reed lurk in the shadows here too… His strengths — sense of melody and rhythm, ability to extemporize through rhyme, half rhyme, or image association — are everywhere in abundance. ~Richard Stevenson, Lethbridge Insider

Fisher’s undeniable energy will take him further down the road of excess toward the palace of wisdom. ~Harry Vandervlist, Alberta Views

An atheist with an uncommon adhesion to the profane attributes of current mortal satisfactions, J. Fisher will have you enticed, his imagery will haunt you and his lacerate heart will **** you gently to the next piece of art. Enjoy, be welcome, beware. ~Christopher Rice

Samples

Vaseline Era

“…time to get clean, boy
time to get clean.
Like a whistle stop,
or pumpernickel smell,
shaving only one side of your face,
not out of madness
but
out of glee.”
These are easy words
coming from this man
one so used to filthy circumstances.
“I’ve waited a long while in this
burrow
…began to have doubts,
but now that you’re here
we’ll get moving.”
He had grown lean-looking
the sight was giving me the shivers.
His long, unwashed hair was all about him.
He had gone gorgeous in some sorrowful dream.
An old-fashioned masculine
to re-coup for all those years spent under the gun.
“…time to get clean”
indeed.

Budica

Towers of information
fall from the sky.
Buildings get diseased,
a cancer in the steel
that comes from holding in
a sickness of people.
Everyone alive today
is submerged to the lips,
just one moment away
from sucking in the filth
left over when all truth is removed --
sensational saturation and very little else.
The crush of modernity
has left us all in lurch
while shattering the smallest
and the weakest among us
under the weight of observation,
constant and unwelcomed:
the Great Roaming Eye.
Our lives become spectator sport.
There is a ringing
rousing the unconscious Dog,
it’s got the beast shivering
from the sins we romanticize.