Overview

Big Gorgeous Jazz Machine is a collection of experimental graphic works and comics poetry. It includes more traditionally-minded comics (with a lyrical bent) with abstract and conceptual works, including text-based comics and comics inspired by modernist abstractions. Taken together, the work finds kinship with contemporary avant-cartoonists like Warren Craghead, Aidan Koch, and Simon Moreton, while striking out toward something altogether new. Parts of this collection have appeared in Devil's Lake, TYPO Magazine, The Offing, PANK Magazine, Entropy Magazine, Big Other, Horse Less Review, Heavy Feather Review, among others.

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9781949065145

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A lovely collection of poetry comics that don't fear the page, the materials, or the reader. Every piece pushes a little deeper than you can anticipate, and every page shows off a fresh new experiment. Considered, organic, delectable! - Sam Alden, author of New Construction What is a feeling? What is a poem? What is silence? What is a word? I used to have answers to these questions. Then I read Nick Potter's Big Gorgeous Jazz Machine. Now I only have ecstatic fever dreams of blobs and swirls stretching and oozing, folding and swelling across an open field of limitless possibilities. This is an amazing book, and you will love it! - Kathryn Nuernberger, author of The Witch of Eye A beguiling and beautiful collection of comics that seem to grow from the page, capturing fleeting moments with organic grace. - Simon Moreton, author of Where? Nick Francis Potter's Big Gorgeous Jazz Machine is a prismatic, polychromatic machine of penciled comic and poetry, whose magnificent work will ignite you into falling in love with an inextinguishable man wearing a white shirt on fire and into falling in love with violetesque chairs, and other chaotic splendors such as a tablecloth like chapel, skylight, dogs, low-battery jazz machine, armchairs, and even Alvin Dillinger's twin brother, Conrad, who turns worrying and disappearance into a pulsating, sibylline art. Potter is a genius at taking the mundane and converting it into a kaleidoscopic tool of percipient humor and incisive wisdom. His drawings, unlike Edward Gorey's, are a cauldron of colors, globetrot you into a psychedelic voyage, and strap you on a lexical, graphitic seatbelt just so you could feel graphemically and hallucinogenically safe in his supercalifragilisticexpialidocious world. -Vi Khi Nao, author of Fish in Exile These works, that are a delight to the eye, and a dream for the ear-are exactly what I look for in poetry comics. They experiment with visions of text (and absence of text) and our human greed for narrative. -Bianca Stone, author of The Mobius Strip Club of Grief Reading Big Gorgeous Jazz Machine is like flipping through a friend's in-progress sketchbook. There is something beautifully unfinished about these comics, which isn't to say that there is work left undone, but that the pieces seem the result of an effortless genius, as if Potter sat down and produced the entire book in one leisurely afternoon. Each piece seems to reflect a thought held in the liminal space between events, like thoughts we obsess over in the shower or while pretending to work. The book begins with a narrative then moves to more puzzling pieces that combine text and image in such a way that the reader must enter the drawings in order to decipher them, making the experience that much more intimate. Anyone stumbling across this collection will feel the unmistakable sensation of having found something singular and special, like coming across the work of Ray Johnson or Jess Collins for the first time. And as that lucky reader traverses the pages of BGJM, gorgeously, chaos ensues. - Isobel O'Hare, author of all this can be yours Nick Francis Potter's Big Gorgeous Jazz Machine is a prismatic, polychromatic machine of penciled comic and poetry, whose magnificent work will ignite you into falling in love with an inextinguishable man wearing a white shirt on fire and into falling in love with violetesque chairs, and other chaotic splendors such as a tablecloth like chapel, skylight, dogs, low-battery jazz machine, armchairs, and even Alvin Dillinger's twin brother, Conrad, who turns worrying and disappearance into a pulsating, sibylline art. Potter is a genius at taking the mundane and converting it into a kaleidoscopic tool of percipient humor and incisive wisdom. His drawings, unlike Edward Gorey's, are a cauldron of colors, globetrot you into a psychedelic voyage, and strap you on a lexical, graphitic seatbelt just so you could feel graphemically and hallucinogenically safe in his supercalifragilisticexpialidocious world. -Vi Khi Nao, author of Fish in Exile These works, that are a delight to the eye, and a dream for the ear-are exactly what I look for in poetry comics. They experiment with visions of text (and absence of text) and our human greed for narrative. -Bianca Stone, author of The Mobius Strip Club of Grief

Nick Francis Potter's Big Gorgeous Jazz Machine is a prismatic, polychromatic machine of penciled comic and poetry, whose magnificent work will ignite you into falling in love with an inextinguishable man wearing a white shirt on fire and into falling in love with violetesque chairs, and other chaotic splendors such as a tablecloth like chapel, skylight, dogs, low-battery jazz machine, armchairs, and even Alvin Dillinger's twin brother, Conrad, who turns worrying and disappearance into a pulsating, sibylline art. Potter is a genius at taking the mundane and converting it into a kaleidoscopic tool of percipient humor and incisive wisdom. His drawings, unlike Edward Gorey's, are a cauldron of colors, globetrot you into a psychedelic voyage, and strap you on a lexical, graphitic seatbelt just so you could feel graphemically and hallucinogenically safe in his supercalifragilisticexpialidocious world. -Vi Khi Nao, author of Fish in Exile These works, that are a delight to the eye, and a dream for the ear-are exactly what I look for in poetry comics. They experiment with visions of text (and absence of text) and our human greed for narrative. -Bianca Stone, author of The Mobius Strip Club of Grief

Author Information

NICK FRANCIS POTTER is a writer, cartoonist, and educator living in Columbia, Missouri. He is the author of New Animals, winner of the Subito Press Prize for Innovative Prose, published in 2016. His prose and comics have been featured in Ninth Letter, Black Warrior Review, Sleepingfish, Caketrain, Fourteen Hills, The Chattahoo-chee Review, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among many others. He is the comics editor forANMLY (formerly Drunken Boat).He has an MFA from Brown University and a PhD in English from the University of Missouri, where he currently teaches writing and theory in the Digital Storytelling Program.

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