Valvular Ash pulls out all the stops, both hinges & unhinges, floats & burrows, clasps & heaves, -- an unfettered blitzkrieg juggling infinities across incandescent Vastnesses.

This latest Heller exfoliation shimmers forth ‘Oscillation,’ probes deep into the ‘Abyss,’ features ‘Gardening at the End of the World,’ ‘You,’ an extended treatment on ‘Tree,’ a meditation on Van Gogh’s Cypresses, further development of the ‘Crossfall’ module, plus hinges to the artist Helen Frankenthaler among others.

With each additional Heller emanation, our world becomes more complex, more curious, more alluring... ith each additional Heller emanation, our world becomes more complex, more curious, more alluring. This is a continuation of Levinson's further exploration of Hinge Theory linguistic based poetics.

Heller Levinson's Hinge Theory has shaken the foundation of what literature is/can/will become. I've anticipated each of his books ever since I was turned onto his brilliant Hinge Theory. Heller Levinson is one of the few contemporary poets whose work will be spoken of long after we have shuffled off this mortal coil. I consider Heller Levinson to be, without a doubt, one the best poets of his generation and a poet whose work will be looked upon as one of the major chapters in American literature."
-- Heath Brougher, author, editor, reviewer.

Heller Levinson lives in NYC where he studies animal behavior. He has published in over a hundred journals and magazines including Sulfur, Jacket, Hunger, Talisman, First Intensity, Laurel Review, Omega, The Wandering Hermit, Fire (U.K), Alligatorzine, The Jivin' Ladybug, Moria, Woodcoin, etc. His last publications, Jus Saying and Lure were also published by Black Widow Press. He is the originator of Hinge Theory.

“In An Opening in the Vertical World, Roger Greenwald offers us poems of a sustained interiority. Here, a highly intelligent, often lonely observer is attuned to the uncertainties of travel, sex, and history—not only to what he sees, but to what no one can see: the secret lovers who never appear from the office building, a reminder delivered by air touching skin, the solitude of crowds. For years, I have loved and admired Roger Greenwald’s poems, and this collection is remarkable for its wit, nuanced self-knowledge, and great technical dexterity.”
— Kevin Prufer

“Roger Greenwald writes poems from a luminous distance, at once an alien in his world and a subtle correspondent, full of news of feelings, images, ideas. His poetry only gets better and better: the language icy and crisp, palpable. I’ve read this latest collection with excitement and gratitude. This is the kind of poetry I need, the kind of poetry we all need to get us through.”

— Jay Parini, author of New and Collected Poems, 1975-2015.

My new collection of poetry is a guide to living in the dictatorship of the new American plutocracy. I was born and raised in Romania, a national-socialist client of the Soviet empire, where poetry was always a nightmare for the state, and a lifeline to the terrified citizen. I emigrated to freedom in the U.S, where the subversive powers of poetry were slowly dissolving into badly-payed entertainment for easily distracted readers. The surveillance of the market wasn't yet as deadly as that of the communist censors, but their merger seems a done deal now. In the face of this civic catastrophy poetry has to be more than eau-de-cologne to dispel the stink of army boots. This book is occasionally clear about that, but there are also poems of love and the plague, childhood scents, the warmth of other bodies, the warnings of history, and the pleasure of making things up. I was taking photogaphs on my daily walks when writing these poems, without meaning to use them, but then I saw that they were strangely and not so strangely connected. My mother and father were photographers in the bad old days, I think their craft shadowed me. I dedicate these works to my predecessors:

tzara fondane celan

my dear anthologies
of gifts and misfortune
birth dates emigration dates
urgent breaks between wars
what is the plural of hiatus

illusions of freedom within
where the holes of culture used to be
now overgrown by words
tzara's good timing
the radical temperament of youth
your fucking bourgeois hypocrisy must die
fondane's bad timing
longing for summer pastures
i do mistake the pastoral for culture
these are my sheep
celan in the silence
after the apocalypse
translates the murmur
of the murdered mother tongue

A pile of sand accreted round a bend in the Mississippi. Eons of too-rich silt in a concave too unstable to farm. A jungle shunned by all but the worst species. A Spanish wreck the French refused to admit couldn’t be saved. A monument to man’s inhumanity, its streets named to honor music and the Muses and a slave exchange. End of the line for the almost-rans. If  you can’t make it here…stay anyway.

Set in New Orleans during the 1990s, the books function as an accidental time capsule after a 2005 levee breach demolished the city. Since their release, readers have commented on the odd continuity between the books and how they seemingly map out a lost corridor through the city’s secret past. 

Sometimes called “The 90s Trilogy” or “The Stay Out Trilogy”, the first three P. Curran books lay at the intersection of brutal crime & supernatural occult fiction, detailing the grind of living in a place celebrated for its culture and hospitality while maintaining a reputation for being, at various times, the world’s murder capital. This sequel, another sly web of genre-defying tales, weaves characters and places from those earlier books into the treacherous new flora that sprung up in the flood’s wake.

P. Curran is a strange storyteller. As one of the pen names of Peter Orr,  P. Curran has found their work in the hands of readers via merch table, guitar case, record shop, table at the French Market, & beyond. Originally from New York, Peter has barely scraped by or lived high on the hog in New Orleans since the early 90s. Oh and sure he's been to the university and edited magazines and what have ye. He used to edit magazines, then for twenty-five years played music in New Orleans nightclub.

A fragmented group of friends stumble through the aftermath of…what? A shared hallucination? A transpersonal breakdown? Some event they desperately don't want to discuss and no one else can understand. Did it happen? If they imagined the whole thing, why are they all losing their minds?

In movies an otherworldly event always explains itself-the ghost tells where the gold is hid or why the castle's haunted, the curse unveils some sin that birthed it. The story resolves. Pieces fit.

In life when something weird happens, you don't get answers. Instead you face an endless chain of paralyzing questions.

Until you don’t.

P. Curran is a strange storyteller. As one of the pen names of Peter Orr,  P. Curran has found their work in the hands of readers via merch table, guitar case, record shop, table at the French Market, & beyond. Originally from New York, Peter has barely scraped by or lived high on the hog in New Orleans since the early 90s. Oh and sure he's been to the university and edited magazines and what have ye. He used to edit magazines, then for twenty-five years played music in New Orleans nightclubs.He is the author of the now recognized cult classic: Stay Out of New Orleans. He lives in New Orleans.