The Syndicate of Water & Light: A Divine Comedy [Paperback]

In subtitling this book A Divine Comedy, the poet Marc Vincenz brushes up against Dante, and yet he does so in the pulse of a breath, /waiting for the rain / to wash away the dream. There is light herenot perhaps the roseate of the Florentine retinuebut one we can use right now: All visions / gone, but this, a world, / a world / dancing ahead. Vincenz questions notions of humanity, the potency and power of language over time, implying perhaps that codes have driven us throughout history and that the emergence of the AI will yield the next stage in its evolution. After a long night of the soul, where formal religion yields to love and imagination, we emerge to a healing space that is both inner and outer, physical and spiritual.The Syndicate of Water & Lightgives us a sense that we can grow in knowledge and that we can changeif not, perhaps, the world, then at least within ourselves.

Marc Vincenz is co-editor of the journalFulcrum, international editor ofPlume, publisher and editor of MadHat Press and Plume Editions. He is the author of eleven books of poetry, includingBecoming the Sound of Bees(Ampersand Books, 2015),Sibylline(Ampersand Books, 2016) and the forthcomingLeaning into the Infinite(Dos Madres Press, 2018). His novella set in ancient China,Three Taos of T’ao, or How to Catch a White Elephant, is to be released by Spuyten Duyvil in 2018. He has also been widely published elsewhere, including inThe Nation, Ploughshares, The Common, Solstice, Raritan, Notre Dame Review, World Literature Today, Los Angeles Review of Books, New World Writing, et al. Vincenz, who was born in Hong Kong and holds dual British and Swiss nationalities, is a multi-lingual translator of many contemporary German, French and Romanian authors. His latest work of translation,Unexpected Development(White Pine Press, 2018), by prize-winning Swiss novelist, poet and playwright Klaus Merzló&