IMP: The Poetry of | Benjamin DeCasseres

Author: Benjamin DeCasseres
Introduction: Kevin I. Slaughter
Publisher: Underworld Amusements
Pages: 195 Size: 6x9"
Release date: November, 2013 ISBN: 978-0983031451

Ironist, Critic, Poet, Nietzschean, Anarch. Friend of H.L. Mencken, Charles Fort and relative of Spinoza. Published in periodicals ranging from the radical anarchist Liberty, to the mainstream Life, his work is now mostly lost and forgotten save a mention every decade or so by scholars or writers who have stumbled across him.

This volume contains the known poetry of Benjamin DeCasseres (1873-1945) outside of his ANATHEMA! Litanies of Negationand the few poems written in tribute to his brother Walter, contained in The Sublime Boy. 129 poems in verse and prose, collected from two published volumes (The Shadow-Eater and Black Suns) and culled from dozens of periodicals over the first half of the 20th century. The Shadow-Eater destroyed my critical sense and begun its reconstruction. —John Macey

Benjamin DeCasseres (is) the Pontius Pilate of America. —H.L. Mencken

DeCasseres is the most savage, the most independent but often the most paradoxical and sometimes the most poetically obscure that I know. —Remy de Gourmont

There is something Titanic in the way DeCasseres hurls his words at the universe... This merciless rebel who threatens the throne of God. —Current Literature

The man who wrote The Shadow-Eater has been at Gethsemane and Armageddon. —El Diario (Mexico City)

The philosophy of The Shadow-Eater will Outlast time itself. —The Poetry Journal

Your essays are the poetry of utter philosophy… I have had the time of my life with all the magnificent stuff you sent me. —Jack London

There is but one Benjamin DeCasseres. And he is perhaps the one living wonder of the literary world. It is fortunate that such an one must be born, that he cannot be made; especially that he cannot be imitated, for if every one wrote like DeCasseres readers would go mad. That he can keep in any semblance of thought-order such whirls of words is something to marvel at. Yet to read him once, twice, is to experience the greatest mental exhilaration. —New York Times

No such poetry since Les Fleurs du Mal of Baudelaire. —Carlo de Fornaro

He occupies a niche that is all his own and asks space to stand for no other man. —The Nation