BLUE JAY SLAYER whispers and shouts at us but never tells us what to think. It is dark at times, yes, but not what you'd expect: playful sometimes, angry sometimes, reticent when necessary. It's brimming with curses and gifts. When Matt Hart declares "The grass doesn't grow where I take you" you know-just know-that he isn't lying. He tells us Ken Henson is not who he appears to be, "which is correct". Henson certainly gives us glimpses of who he may be with his illustrations of the flaming reality of the dark side but without the hellish clichés. Well, maybe there are a few, but those, of course, are intentional. Hart digs up the dead with his words and points to what we think is real, while making us question what we initially thought. BJS will take you like you could get permanently lost in that world and never come back, but you do. You come back feeling exuberant; you come back feeling absolved.
Author Biography:
MATT HART is the author of several books of poems, including Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless (Typecast Publishing, 2012), Debacle Debacle (H_NGM_N Books, 2013) and Radiant Action (forthcoming, H_NGM_N Books). Additionally, his poems, reviews, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous print and online journals, including The Academy of American Poets online, Big Bell, Cincinnati Review, Coldfront, Columbia Poetry Review, H_NGM_N, Harvard Review, Jam Tarts Magazine, jubilat, Kenyon Review online, Lungfull!, and POETRY Magazine, among others. His awards include a Pushcart Prize, a 2013 individual artist grant from The Shifting Foundation, and fellowships from both the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. A co-founder and the editor-in-chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking & Light Industrial Safety, he lives in Cincinnati where he teaches at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and plays in the band TRAVEL. A Curtis G. Lloyd Fellow at the Lloyd Library and Museum, KEN HENSON is the author and illustrator of the treatise Alchemy and Astral Projection: Ecstatic Trance in the Hermetic Tradition (LLM, 2014), the illustrated novella/grimoire HIGH GRAVITY: Werewolves, Ghosts, and Magick Most Black (Oneiric Imprint, 2015). He also recently collaborated with the Philosophical Research Society to restore and reissue Manly P. Hall and John Augustus Knapp's Revised New Art Tarot. Ken's writings and art have been published in periodicals such as Abraxas, Clavis Journal, and The Gnostic Journal, and he has presented at the Esoteric Book Conference, SCIENTIAE, Babalon Rising, and the Left Hand Path Conference. He is an Associate Professor and the Head of Illustration at the Art Academy of Cincinnati in Ohio where he teaches studio courses and Art and the Occult.
