Description
- Kind: Perfectbound
- Pages: 164
- Language: English
- Date Published: September 22, 2025
- ISBN 978-1-962847-33-9
Praise
The first thing to occur to me upon reading All the Tricks of Language is wanting to go back and read each poem again, and again, and again, because it felt so good. The words clicked into place like the gears of a clock, sonic subtleties combined with the vivid, tactile imagery of a theatrum mundi. This is the work of a seasoned poet, with a bit of the bricklayer in him. Phanopoeia spread with a trowel. Flashes of linguistic splendor, tastefully muted by an overarching sense of decorum, illumine particularities of truth, the manifest beauty of things in themselves ‘tricked into breathing.’ —John Olson
All The Tricks of Language—that title glitters, disappears into itself, and ushers in a wild and meticulous poetics of forward motion. Vincenz is a dancemaster who understands that we exist against terrific odds. There’s a chord of tears and laughter, an intimate knowledge of our vulnerability: ‘the sinful and awkward under the lion’s gaze’. The architecture of this book is vertiginous. Background becomes foreground (‘the disciples will tell you it wasn’t a bad supper’), foreground is open to the night sky (‘the absolute demand/yet more…’). Vincenz has a dazzling wit and a great eye for the contingent, the perishable, the hue of a damselfly’s eye. All The Tricks Of Language is a book like no other—a bravura tour de force. a sui generis structure, a volley of arrows shot into the unknown. —D. Nurkse
Marc Vincenz has done it again! In All the Tricks of Language, he gives his readers a hybrid wonder…. A play starring Denise Levertov and Sylvia Plath and Pessoa and John Donne. A lyric suite. A pastiche. An epic complete with a descent into the Underworld. A prayer for all the sentient beings on this planet. An ode to our pipes and man made marvels. All the Tricks of Language is a remarkable feat from an assiduous wordsmith who builds a world like no other. —Denise Duhamel
Marc Vincenz’s All the Tricks of Language conjures a panoply of sentient beings, including—yet not excluding—the Norse god Freyr, Fernando Pessoa, and torpor trapped beneath fish scales. These poems journey across space and time, through and under plants and planets, and into variations of life forms. Concurrently, the poems sing to beloved ghosts and dreamers, and, extraordinarily, the poet collects the echoes of these ghosts, offering them, too, to us. Such magical worlds materialize through the curtain of the poet’s material, which is language, due to his sheer virtuosity. —Martine Bellen
Excerpt
A Tribute to Whom
Oh, you genius, you beehive,
you spark, you contiguous line—
all from the same place of origin
where there is no breeze.
All those questions posed …
take no notice, the image
is stamped on your brow, even
as you glare in the mirror,
as the others are orbiting,
the day is melting—and yes,
we tried, in the smoke, lounging
on the divan, to ask for both.
How could we grasp
your learned teachings? You lived
on the other side of the wall.
Your postal system isn’t working.
Bring out the best glasses,
decant, pull out your moth-
eaten clothwares—the ones ravished
by life. You know you know the man
you bought them from.
Author
Marc Vincenz is a poet, fiction writer, translator, editor, musician and artist. He has published over 40 books of poetry, fiction and translation. His more recent poetry collections include, The Pearl Diver of Irunmani, A Splash of Cave Paint, The King of Prussia is Drunk on Stars, Spells for the Wicked and IRØNCLAD. His translation of Swiss poet and novelist Klaus Merz’ selected poems, An Audible Blue, received the 2023 Massachusetts Book Prize for Translated Literature.
Marc’s work has been published in The Nation, Ploughshares, Raritan, Colorado Review, Washington Square Review, Plume, Fourteen Hills, Willow Springs, Solstice, World Literature Today, The Notre Dame Review, The Golden Handcuffs Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books and many other journals and periodicals.
He is publisher and editor of MadHat Press and publisher of the essential New American Writing, and lives on a farm in Western Massachusetts where there are more spiny-nosed voles, tufted grey-buckle hares and Amoeba scintilla than bi-pedal hominids.
