LALIA, by Adam Cornford

Description

LALIA, by Adam Cornford

Poetry. ISBN 978-1-946104-27-4. 154 pages.

The supernova blaze of Adam Cornford’s poetry fuses surrealism, science, politics, and eros to yield exotic particles of meaning rarely found on Earth. Cornford’s vision, like that of Blake, overleaps the dark Satanic mills of commodity culture to discover a utopia that can only be configured by radical imagery. Here, language becomes a ‘semiotic multiverse’ proliferating toward an emancipated future. With this long-awaited major collection, Cornford affirms his place among that visionary company of poets empowered to chant the re-enchantment of word and world.

— Andrew Joron

Adam Cornford’s Lalia is his latest lingual spell that burns as a protracted anti-acrostic, as a book-length compendium psycho-geologic in demeanor. These poems seem to writhe as spells kinetic with all manner of exploration, all the while suffused with an interior skill-set susurrant via a penetrant grammar. Indeed, Lalia ignites an inner syllabus absorbing ripples from a Blakean cosmos that seem on the surface opaque with vatic inscription, yet all the while dazzling with lingual texture as vision.

— Will Alexander

Adam Cornford immigrated to the United States from England in 1979. Since then, he has lived mostly in California but moved to the Philadelphia area in 2020. Cornford led the Poetics Program at New College of California from 1987 until the college closed in 2008. Today he works as a freelance writer and editor. His poetry has appeared widely in print and on the web, including four full-length poetry collections—Shooting Scripts (1978), Animations (1988), Decision Forest (1998), and Lalia (2021). Other works include Liber Ignis (2013), a serial documentary poem with historical photographs, in collaboration with the printer and book artist Peter Rutledge Koch—and several chapbooks, among them ‘Round Midnight (1989), O-Town (2003), Scapes (2010) and Mask Report (2014). He has also written lyrics and libretti for the composer Daniel Steven Crafts, who has set several of his poems. A lineal descendant of Charles Darwin, Cornford focuses strongly on science, notably biology, computer science, quantum physics, and cosmology, in his poetry and thought. He counts William Blake and Surrealism as

seminal and continuing influences.