Absences: Poetry [Mīkstie vāki]

"It has been said that the poet’s job is to make the invisible environment that surrounds and captures us visible in his writings—it is invisible because it has fallen beneath the threshold of perception—and this is exactly what Michael Aaron Kamins has done in his poetry cycle 'Absences' in a kind of shamanic feat wherein, utilizing a modern equivalent of the shaman’s ancient ability to illuminate the hidden skeletal structures of plants and animals, he has made visible for us the internal semiotic anatomy of our present global civilization....Kamins runs off to trace out his own creative line of flight along an arc of glittering verbal virtuosity that is absolutely dazzling, and specifically designed to hypnotize and narcotize the reader into an altered state of consciousness wherein, in visionary form, the hidden skeleton of the internal lines of globalization start to become visible all around him...Kamins’s performance as a first time poet here is an astonishing achievement of verbal incantation and neo-electric shamanism.” From the Afterword by John David Ebert