The Figments Are Here is a book of medicine for the mind and soul. Jefferson Hansen takes the reader on a hike through the fragility of what is real and true, and offers a poetic journey through raw existence and a deep mental struggle of a scattered consciousness. In this text, the poet causes the real and the virtual to blur into a scattered survey of the fluid boundaries between nature and spirit. These poems are magical, surreal, and they dance at the edge of a dreamy discourse, and offer a poetic ground that is fluid, evolving, and saturated with imagination. This is the second title by Jefferson Hansen to be published by PAP.
"Jefferson Hansen’s The Figments Are Here rides a decentralized ego living its ecosystem as the embodied actions of a particular shapeshifting, nonhuman entity, cognitive and of this Earth…a super-terrestrial commanded by a female crow to “Burn up everything always,” verbalizing an ecosystemic necessity as life creates entropy out of order. Hansen translates a conscious, spiritual entity from this scientific fact, shedding and gaining form as it passes through various aspects of systemic-textual necessity at any given place in time. Simply put, Figments renders a deep ecological consciousness—the mind of an ever-morphing space transducing itself into time. Poetry colludes with biocentrism and Buddhism to formulate the text’s projected reality as a readable if conspired consciousness appropriated by its perceived and experienced time as a sentient biological entity on Earth. Bravo!"
—Chuck Richardson, author of Iterations of Lilith and Adam
"The poems in Jefferson Hansen’s The Figments Are Here connects music to life, not on a superficial pop culture level, but on a primal and transcendent level. Animals and nature are not the "other"; they are connected to everything we experience—but humans in their limitation often do not recognize this reality, caught up in being humans."
Product details
- Publisher : Post-Asemic Press (July 5, 2023)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 273 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1734866292
- ISBN-13 : 978-1734866292
- Item Weight : 1.05 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 0.62 x 9 inches
- Price : $16.00
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All I know is a strand
of hair curled up
in the corner of a grand ballroom
that has a high, vaulted ceiling.
Most of the ballroom is empty space
though a few people dance
and gyrate slowly.
They are joined by a few
strange beings,
some with three heads
and some with three torsos,
which look like closely arranged pillars
on the porch of a rich house.
Some of these beings help us humans
get by and get out.
Others mean to eat us and do.
We are good food.
There are weird beings everywhere
we look carefully.
Some are hungry.
They are not spirits.
They are beings.
They are figments.
They dance for they dance.
the headless treeman
the headless treeman
foot soles rooted into
a hilltop pumps blood
up between his shoulders
where his head would be
and it courses down
the furrows of the bark
to the now red earth
where some of it seeps in
only to be captured
by the roots and pumped
through the soles up
the legs and torso to
the heart where it pulses
out and gushes up
in rhythmic geysers
but some blood flows
in rivulets downhill
where it soaks into
the earth and along
these little streams sprout
red orchids reaching
like the treeman’s leaved
fingers for the sun
Mountains Forget
On the day mountains forgot
to be mountains and the rivers
forgot to be rivers
the morning dawned with two suns,
the one seen and the one thought.
But it wasn’t a special day.
Each day mountains and rivers
forget themselves and the sun
dawns as itself and another.
Things are simply not looked at.
Instead, blueprints and figures explain
ahead of time exactly what is
to be seen. Such is seen.
The mountains just forget.
The rivers just forget, too.
Someday the sun will forget
to dawn and it won’t be noticed.
The expected sun will instead
crawl across the sky, high at noon,
low in the west by evening.
