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Poetry, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features.
FLASH SHEET is a marriage of two art forms, poetry and tattooing, that are as old as history but rarely in such close proximity together. Poems are read and written for every reason: to celebrate love, to commemorate hatred, to grieve, to rejoice, to reify, to signify, to preserve. Tattoos provide the same functions. It’s unusual that there are so few instances where the two disciplines are as near and dear to one another as they are in FLASH SHEET. This work seeks to close that distance by linking poems and their corresponding pieces of bespoke tattoo flash.
The poetry of the book is pure punk psychedelia—surreal and dreamlike, but burning with a ferocity in its high-voltage spirit. The tattoos split the difference between crude hardcore pen-and-ink scribble and highbrow fine-art illustration. Both poem and tattoo are born from the wildness of punk.
There’s a foundational intentionality to this union of poetry and tattooing; if you love one of these poems, this book provides a way for you to take it with you forever. You can physically make any of these poems a part of yourself. There may not be a stronger act of commitment.
Zack Carson is a poet and musician from Asheville, NC. He received his MFA from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. His work has been published in Passages North, BRUISER, The Shore, and others. We Mean It Man.