Western Practice

“[*Western Practice*] is a gorgeous almanac of Motika’s West Coast aesthetic. . .” —*The Poetry Project Newsletter* “Nervy, desperate, and mysteriously stoic, Motika’s debut is a paean to California’s artists, geography, and history that wrestles with urban diminishment and cacophony every step of the way.” —*Publishers Weekly* “Publisher of Nightboat Books, Motika offers generous fractured poems that spread like starfish over the pages of his first book.” —*Library Journal* “While there’s a dreamy Venusian quality to Stephen Motika’s poetry, it’s also driven by a care and clarity that animates its landscapes. Western Practice is a book that deserves attention for its rich intersections of projective acrobatics and coming-of-age memory-textures, conjuring the roar of the Pacific at every turn of the line.” —Lisa Jarnot “If twentiety century California artists established a tradition of speculative innovation, then *Western Practice* ushers visionary West Coast poetics into the twenty-first. Motika’s ingenious ear renders place prosodic; his ‘baroque leaps’ tender a sprung rhythm that turns history into ‘a theory at map’s edge.’ The ‘mystic/gather’ of this music give Motika’s ambitious projective praxis visual beauty and structural rigor. Open this book—’crawl inside & lie down against the future.'” —Brian Teare “How to approach a microtonal notation of a life? Within a diverse field of spacing, Motika’s poem “Delusions Enclosures: On Harry Partch (1901-1974)” scores a biography of the sounds of words and phrases written by the composer himself in and among the poet’s own. In a way, notes. And a fine debut.” —Marjorie Welish “. . .*Western Practice* is a vast poetic anthropology. . .Motika’s poems shed the trappings of the solipsistically subjective, producing an efflorescence of wonder about the world at large.” —*The Brooklyn Rail* “Motika’s writing looks and sounds different than his contemporaries’, yet there is no denying the way the light shines on these poems. . . . *Western Practice* does for the west coast what *Leaves of Grass* did for the east: it reveals art in everyday life.” —*Lambda Literary*