John Amen is our Jakob Böhme sporting a Hermes Trismegistus phrenology replete with mosaic crown and gold shroud. The base metal of the quotidian is transmuted into the gold of ecstatic and troubled occasions in At the Threshold of Alchemy. As with any fetal emergence, the labor is rigorous. A reader will not find an expedient route to closure nor to the desiccated entrails of confession, so all-pervasive in this sad age where poetry is extolled for its redundant proximity to banality. With John Amen, we watch a literary pyre carry its corpses to the fire. A crowd dressed in black laments the passing of the Beats, the Neobeats, the tired Language Poets, the elite literary press conspirators, the Master of Fine Arts covens, the mavens of  poetry workshops enroute to Monaco with their wealthy and aspiring acolytes and the Professors of English, maintaining their tenure-track with monosyllables and first-person narratives. The mortician reads the latest poem from the current issue of The New Yorker and lights himself on fire.

Of note and singular achievement in this exquisite collection are “gnostic” with its gnosis of detail, the extended anti-love poem “Portraits of Mary,” the Charles Baudelaire-inspired poem “Salient Matters,” and the mise-en-scène “All Night (or Kyros: The Eternal Moment).” It is with the brilliant “Rampage” that our faithful modern Böhme crosses the threshold of alchemical resolve. Once in, once crossed and receding in a distance of lit semaphores, the reader immediately encounters a “Mind” that “fortifies what it wishes to dismantle,” or a trope roughing the Freudian periphery of negation. Transcendence fined down becomes what it seeks to transcend as its augmented opposite, the base matter, the quotidian forcing us down to what John Amen calls a “bottomless conspiracy.”

Mind
fortifies what it wishes to dismantle,
bogs itself in what it strives to transcend.

Its petals are pinned against yellow pages.

Mind
is scaling a graphic loop of rungs,
treading a bottomless conspiracy.

The normative portals of transcendence determined by a canonic conduit are no longer accessible. The “bottomless conspiracy” is replete with clichés uttered by the vacuous who fear instant apocalypse and prepare survivalist retreats in remote regions. They/we (the reader) have to travel through “manic bougainvillea” and a “plastic surgeon” who “invested in Halliburton” to end up, albeit temporarily, in a suburb whose “vinyl jaw is unhinged.” Where are we or where have we been thrown asked the 2^nd century gnostic theologian Valentinus? John Amen’s third eye, the pineal, savage intelligence of the omniscient I, sees it all too clearly with vinyl tears. We are in the under/overworld of the “Mutant fungi.”

Icecaps thaw, glaciers melt, polar bears drown
in the shelfless waters. Dumpsters in the Antarctic.

The maestros of petrol wave their batons,
sodomizing the great mother, siphoning her milk.

Mutant fungi in the crawlspace, stealth of bacteria.
The canyons weep, inauguration of murder.

True, poor Edomite, man is born unto trouble,¹
but must we really give shelter to our betrayers?²

The “new poetry” will be peopled by the post-Edomite’s unleashing their “mutant fungi” on the consensual experience of platitudes. Thousands of books of contemporary poetry will find entire sections simply missing from their pages. The books, themselves, will remain intact, although in numerous cases, absent a title. This viral pandemic will effect every language and every form of poetry. In fact, it is the entropic prognostication of this reviewer that even the verbal platitude will be erased from the larynx. Thousands of people will simply find themselves entirely healthy but mute, or producing silence in place of a word in mid-sentence and grimacing. As John Amen tells us, it is not merely the genius of “mutant fungi” but also the “stealth of bacteria” that will obliterate vapid nuance and the cultural terrorism of empty trope.

The plebeians take umbrage. Afterall, an entire industry is at risk of producing tens of thousands of books with empty pages. Amen bestows upon us peripatetic images ranging from the “dismissive” to the grotesque to illustrate this umbrage.

Dismissive snorts,
suspicious eyes, the clammy handshake.

Melancholy mannequins,
lipstick smiles carved into styrofoam faces.
Children in camouflage. The gloved hand
always scrawling in the black pad.

From the “black pad,” the void, or the alchemically charred hand of the new magician, comes a far more dangerous dark, the “sulphurous breeze” linked to “greed and illusion.” John Amen is subtle and dangerous. Our “greed” for more “illusion” is our greed for the panegyric, destined to purify our blocking agents who will “vanish in the zyklon night.” In an imaginary set of holy appendices, we honor our debt to Paracelsus who was reincarnated as an I.G. Farbenindustrie AG chemist. The alchemy of poison gas—the stench of cliché—our coeval fate exhumed by a future coroner with a penchant for biotechnology and prosody.

A respite comes for somnambulists who sabotage the manufacture of narration by leaping to their miserable deaths from grand geometric bridges.

So many sleepwalkers leaping
into the mist of Brooklyn Bridge, Golden Gate,
so many limbs flailing in the waves.

They are spared by their deaths. Canonic history can boast no exoneration: not Orpheus, Socrates, Michael or Gabriel. Great cities such as “Jerusalem” will be turned into “phalluses of trade” with “fumes wafting from manholes.”

Jerusalem. Gaza. Tibet. Sudan. Burma. Phalluses
of trade blazing beneath a satellite sky. Fumes
wafting from manholes. Tiananmen. Chernobyl.

On the brick of rapture, the author’s mercury as quicksilver in the lungs, John Amen asks us to “forgive” him “for this insular life.”

Forgive me for eating this bountiful meal.
Forgive me for sleeping beneath this roof.
Forgive me for making love to my wife.
Forgive me for everything I fail to see and do
and avenge. Forgive me for this insular life.

We forgive your “insular,” hermetic life in the mysterium—you grand excavator of meteoric innards. Your tria prima of human identity is worth the salvage, burning the dross of our vapid lives hung between cursory allegiance to routine and the insufferable calendar. Contrary to rote assumption, neither the light nor the dark supplant each other. They coexist as co-authors of our idiosyncratic lives. Ours, that is the practitioners of the “new poetry,” is a type of post-Proustian radical privacy and tropistic ingenuity expanding complexity with fissures, solvents and digital aqua vitae. We are neither reclusive nor apocalyptic, rather seeking to make, as you stunningly say, “protean atomic strands shifting/a priori a posteriori fracturing & centripetal,” the agon between the word and the idea.

When the limits of metalepsis have been reached and broken, why not invoke a Pythagorean hagiography with a smattering of Indic transmigration?

The hypotenuse is a broken arm.
The compass is a roulette wheel.

abcdfgik2x2=6
incarnation absolute chromosomal & karmic
f(x) amidst entropy must in turn beget

The shortest distance
between two points is numbness.

“Numbness,” or for the manic aspirants among us who kneel before the new canon, that distance is called Monas Hieroglyphica—the glyph as pure transumption casting a viral hue on mundanity. Reaching the boiling, sulphuric glow of alchemical malaise, we emerge upon Amen’s eighth (viii.) most compelling and titular section—the “Brain of Man.”

Brain of man, hemorrhaging, bereft
of divinity, cries out, groping for its raft
of reason: then fuzz, descent, oblivion.

Heart of nature, trapped in a ruptured hull,
forsaken angel flagging in a sea of indifference,
foundered in the barbarian darkness.

Macro to micro, frantic clusters, molecules
huddling like shivering prisoners: ultimate
nucleation, chemistry reduced to a mob hug,
a final flood of stone: ubiquitous sepulchrum.

The alchemical panacea, elixir, the philosopher’s stone—all hedged in the “brain of man,” which is “hemorrhaging” from its lexicon of clichés, finds divinity bereft: absent, in bereavement over the death-of-god. Unsaved, even by the savage genius of the “mutant fungi,” this wilting cerebral muscle becomes fuzz (fuzzy logic), descends back into base matter, to eventually disperse into “oblivion.” The virus attacks the viral—disease is increased. It’s a “rampage.” In the “heart of nature,” as Amen avers, lies the “barbarian darkness,” decoded from “macro to micro,” to “frantic clusters,” all “like shivering prisoners.” In this “ubiquitous sepulchrum,” we find alchemy in reverse from the rubedo (the reddening) back to nigredo (the blackening) as described in the medieval Magnus Opus, or from unification to dissolution.

The alchemist furthers his deliverance with an exegetical wax on an anti-origin: “In an un-beginning, void:/ Then something from un-something/emerges,” and we are lured further into the rebus of antitheticals where we are, in spite of ourselves, at our most natural. As Adam “stretches in the protean dawn,” “Eve waits in the wings.” The enfolding dramaturgy is liberated of its diachronic chains, as we, half synthetic now and half some organic solvent, mixed yellowish-white, resolve to be alchemically fractured in the pure irony of Amen at his best, “Indeed, all is one—divine, absurd, conflicted.”

The reviewer has taken numerous liberties with what may be dubbed interpretative misprision, or creative misreading in analyzing John Amen’s great poem “Rampage” within the context of his magnificent third book, At the Threshold of Alchemy. Yet, it is just this misprision, maneuvering between Amen’s tropes which inspire this reviewer to recommend this book so highly. Great poetry doesn’t rot on the dusty shelf of a gold-plated decrescendo. It demands agonic play. It agitates and provokes in order to stir play and invention. At the Threshold of Alchemy is our spur. We read, play and write.