The Nothingness Kit

John W. Sexton was born in 1958 and identifies with the Aisling poetic tradition. His work spans vision poetry, contemporary fabulism and tangential surrealism. He is the author of seven poetry collections, the most recent being: The Offspring of the Moon (Salmon Poetry 2013), Futures Pass (Salmon Poetry 2018), and Visions at Templeglantine (Revival Press 2020). A chapbook of his surrealist poetry, Inverted Night, came out from SurVision in April 2019. His next collection, The World Under the World, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. Under the ironic pseudonym of Sex W. Johnston he has recorded an album with legendary Stranglers frontman, Hugh Cornwell, entitled Sons of Shiva, which was released on Track Records. He is a past nominee for The Hennessy Literary Award and his poem The Green Owl was awarded the Listowel Poetry Prize 2007 for best single poem. In 2007 he was awarded a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in Poetry. Artist Statement The sequences in The Nothingness Kit are comprised of mixed hybrid gendai, scifaiku and minims, and are designed and should be read as graffiti passing in ribbons through the aether. They purport to originate from multiversal existences of the subconscious and oscillate between folktale, literary and cultural allusion, science fiction and dystopian vision. They can be likened to a bombardment of radioactive particles arriving simultaneously from the cosmic past and the accelerating future. In a literal and metaphorical sense, the intention is to mutate the perceptions of the reader. ＂In The Nothingness Kit, John W. Sexton, ’surrealonaut’, daringly untethers haiku in microgravity and lets the form float up against the gamut of his imaginative fancies. The unusual form, hybrid gendai scifaiku, becomes a reservoir for everything from Laika to shoes made of smoke to Johnny Cash to radioactive tea. Spatial and temporal relations blur ’inside the wheredrobe’, in ’the house with whendows’, and we are in the very bittersweet meltdown of dream.＂ - Dean Browne, author of Kitchens at Night (smith/doorstop); winner of the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize, 2021