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MP3 Larissa Shmailo - Exorcism
20 MP3 Songs
SPOKEN WORD: With Music, SPOKEN WORD: Poetry
Details:
Exorcism, Larissa Shmailo''s second poetry CD, displays the remarkable range and electrifying vitality that have won her admirers worldwide. Following fast on the release of The No-Net World, Larissa Shmailo returns to her deepest poetic origins, and from there, reveals an ascendancy that will mystify and astound.
Begin your Exorcism. Take hold of the promise in “Vow.” It’s yours. It asks you to join the “people who fought and won” in “Warsaw Ghetto,” where you’ll find your singing strength. The witty and defiant “Dancing with the Devil” leads you to learn “How to Meet and Dance with Your Death.” This fiery and original narrative is fit only for real explorers. Heed the admonitions to avert unnecessary demons, see the sweaty face of your own Reaper, and know "after that, you will never fear him again, nor seek him." The hauntingly seductive puissance in “He follows her . . .” yields to a caboodle of ghosts surveying a ghostly city in Shmailo’s sparkling translation of “Dante” by Anna Ahkmatova.
As illusions of death wane, you will feel the pleasure and pain of “My First Hurricane.” Then get “Personal” with longing for knowledge of the beloved. Power returns in the gorgeous “The Gospel According to Magdalene,” a manifesto of might, whose structural elements are slyly subverted by sampling. Get under the tongue-in-cheek “Skin,” a grunge hymn, and emerge somewhere on “Catawissa Road,” where a skewering Penelope grudgingly meshes with a mad Odysseus. Overcome distaste for arid wastes when “Ayah” asks why a surplus of sand covers everything bland.
The still center is “Bhakti,” Shmailo’s homage to tenth-century mystic poet Mahadevi-Akka, who worshiped the "Lord White as Jasmine," a destroyer of illusions who offers salvation repeatedly, from world to world. The savage art song, “Bloom” invokes Colette, Sand, and James Joyce and the lives of working women throughout the ages.
You may be well schooled by the “Rules of Reflection,” yet there are perils ahead. This is, after all, an exorcism. A demonic maternal phantasmagoria scolds in “At the Top of My Lungs,” twisting its enigmatic wreath of fears and death. But hold your tears—and your breath—for “Abortion Hallucination,” a lyric hell of loss and blackest light. Survive its strife. Let “New Life 2” bring you back to life. Shmailo’s imaginative and noetic variation on a theme by Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky sifts for signification in catastrophe, inspired by escaping the great trapping fire of war. For more to scale, there’s “Mapping” and, with urbane wit, finding “a use for all that doesn’t fit.”
Engage interior doom and sacred terrain in “Exorcism,” a syncretic chant, part found-poem, part puzzle, part indictment, and part prayer for social justice. If you want, you can fly full circle to “Vow.” Play that first track again, and you have drawn a perfect circle—that hardest of artist’s tasks—accomplished by this poet of intense musical, imaginative, and thematic variety. Possess yourself. Repeat as needed. You stand on holy ground. - Eric Yost
About Larissa Shmailo:
Larissa Shmailo has been published in Fulcrum, Rattapallax, Drunken Boat, MiPoesias, and many other publications;her new chapbook is A Cure for Suicide(Cervena Barva Press 2008). Larissa translated the Russian Futurist opera Victory over the Sun by A. Kruchenych; a DVD of the original English-language production is part of the collection of the New York Museum of Modern Art. She also contributed translations to the anthology Contemporary Russian Poetry published by Dalkey Archive Press. Larissa Shmailo is a director of TWiN Poetry, an informal international collective of recording poets and their listeners, and curator of Sliding Scale Poetry, which organizes benefits for human services and literacy organizations. She is also a public coordinator for the annual Fulcrum and a contributing editor for https://www.tradebit.com. Her first poetry CD, The No-Net World (SongCrew 2006) is frequently heard on radio and Internet broadcasts across the U.S. and the U.K. Larissa is listed in the Poetry Kit Who’s Who in poetry. Visit Larissa at https://www.tradebit.com and at https://www.tradebit.com.
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