ashtray, by Arthur Mudd

Poetry, chapbook, 32 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

ashtray is a study in post-symbolist perception, where images are allowed to retain their symbolic pressure without being reduced to fixed meanings. Moving between waking life and dream, the poems inhabit dark rooms, broken interfaces, grids, figures, bodily sensations, and ordinary objects that seem to become symbols almost against their will. Their flatness is deliberate: rather than heightening experience through confession or lyrical intensity, the poems maintain a plain, cool surface and allow strangeness to accumulate underneath it.

The chapbook treats consciousness as a field of unstable correspondences, where perception, memory, and imagination continually distort one another. Its poems resist the impulse to explain what an image means, preferring instead to observe the moment in which meaning begins to form and then slips away. In this sense, ashtray approaches the symbolic not as a code to be deciphered, but as an atmosphere—a pressure surrounding ordinary things, where the mundane and the uncanny can briefly occupy the same surface.

Arthur Mudd is a poet whose work explores the unstable relationship between perception, consciousness, and the symbolic imagination. Drawing from post-symbolism, phenomenology, mysticism, and the aesthetics of flatness, his poems and visual works treat images not as fixed signs but as surfaces where meaning can emerge, dissolve, and reconfigure itself. Working through spare language, surreal juxtapositions, and ordinary objects made subtly strange, Mudd is interested in the space between sensation and interpretation—where the familiar becomes uncanny and the mind continually attempts to make a world from what it encounters.