Oracle Bones:  Poems 2007
by Richard Milazzo.

First edition paperback:  January 2018.
Designed by Richard Milazzo.
88 pages, with a color cover reproducing a photograph by Joel Fisher, 35 original black and white photographs by Joel Fisher, a black and white photograph of the author on the frontispiece by Joy L. Glass, Deadwood Hotel, Deadwood, South Dakota, February 2008, a preface by the author and a note by the artist.
7.5 x 4.5 in., printed, sewn and bound in Savignano sul Panaro, Italy.
ISBN:  1-893207-42-0.
ISBN:  978-1-893207-42-4.
Published by Tsukuda Island Press
240-0112, Kanagawa Prefecture Miura-gun,
Hayama-machi horiuchi 50, Japan.

RETAIL PRICE: $20.00 (includes postage and handling)

About Oracle Poems:  Poems 2007, the author, Richard Milazzo, writes: “It is a book I wrote ten years ago, but only now do I feel comfortable releasing it. Oddly enough, it is a book written mostly in the United States, New York City, to be exact, London and Paris, with forays into Montana, Wyoming, and Utah.  ‘Oddly’, because so many of my current travels bring me to Southeast Asia and the Far East, especially.  But when I invited Joel Fisher to ‘illustrate’ this book, I knew, of course, that he had been living in Vermont, but also in England and France, and, I found out later, in Germany, as well.  So, in this regard, I thought there might or should be some consanguinity in terms of place or geography.  Not that this is a necessary criterion to collaborate, but I did want to construct or see if there was a connection.

“Having said this, I was also only partially surprised to discover how the photographs by Joel Fisher seemed to have an approach-avoidance relationship with the poems.  Or, to put this another way, they seem to generate a dissonant balance.  Joel puts it this way: ‘I have been trying to get a sense of the space and silence in the poems.  My work as I see it is being sure that the book’s configuration also works emotionally (and sometimes unexpectedly) between the two [the poems and the photographs].  Some images reinforce the poems, others send thoughts in a parallel direction, some superimpose ideas and textures like a duet’ [October 31, 2017].

“The source of Fisher’s photographic images, like the source of his sculptures, is noteworthy.  For a period of time, when he was photographing his installations or documenting his sculptures and found that there were several shots left in the roll of film, he would shoot arbitrarily whatever was around him, just to finish off the roll.  This ‘automatic’, or less conscious decision-making process, allowed him to capture almost a Surrealistic dimension or the more unconscious or latent content of the visible world, at least as he was experiencing it, making what was, in effect, less present or invisible or less noticeable more prominent.  Strangely, the dissonant rapport between the poems and the photographs also serves, in a similar way, to underscore the less extrinsic features of both the poems and the photographs.  In the end, this process, and its various permutations, enable us to experience or see in some small way what is less visible or more invisible in perception or within a given perception.

“The title of the book, Oracle Bones, alludes to an ancient (Roman, I believe) method of prophesizing the future, casting the bones of a creature like a pair of die or a game of Pick-up Sticks and reading our fate in its seemingly chance configurations.”