The poems of Joseph Garner are consise, direct, and powerful statements on love and loss, life and death, reality and illusion. These poems possess that rarest (and not necessarily desirable) of all intellectual traits: true wisdom. They illustrate things that we all know, but so few of us understand: they reveal to us the inner torments of the author, and the inner torments and conflicts of us all.
Joseph says, "I was born and raised in rural North-West England, surrounded by myth and fairytale and a language rich in rhythm and imagery. I moved down south for university, ended up staying on, and now live in Davis, California, where i work as post-doctoral researcher. I also help organise the Davis Poetry Slam, and the Davis Poetry Workshop, two regular venues for local poets to meet, perform and discuss their work. I have been writing for around 9 years, influenced by a career as a zoologist, but also the work of John Donne, the angry young men, Jarvis Cocker, and more recently Charles Bukowski. The first poem I can remember that blew me away was Roger McGough's 'Let me die a young man's death.' The last book was Henry Miller's 'Tropic of Cancer'.
"I'm not a great fan of explaining work. If it fails to resonate emotively with the audience then it has been unsuccessful as a piece of art, and explaining it won't help. However, my writing is primarily concerned with the interleaving of experience, dream, sex, love, aspiration and memory, the pursuit of the inherent beauty in life, the revelations and desolation that that pursuit can bring, and the constraints that our society brings to bear to prevent that process of liberation." You can write to him at JPGarner@UCDavis.Edu.
Joseph's works here at Unlikely Stories are:
2001:
Tell the graphologist, Tell the FBI
The eyes have it
Amnion, allantois, chorion
The cast
Trinity
Echo forever
Eight reasons to call Paris