Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Dead to Rights: A Circularity of Glosas
    Dead to Rights: A Circularity of Glosas
    Dead to Rights: A Circularity of Glosas
    Ebook74 pages39 minutes

    Dead to Rights: A Circularity of Glosas

    By Alain C. Dexter

    3/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Ladies and gentlemen, step right up, don’t be shy, and enter the rhyming gyre of glosas, forty-four line rock operas, poetic pas de deux, created by troubadours of the medieval Spanish courts. Dead to Rights: A Circularity of Glosas features eighteen dramatic mini-tales, introduced by quatrains and philosophies that include Poe, Milton, Epictetus and Dickens; spun to effervescence by the spirited Alain C. Dexter.

    “Glosas deliver like a compact short story, in stereo; they’re a poetic high energy drink, a double shot espresso of verse. You can read one glosa and read it again several times to experience a kaleidoscope effect of something new with each reread. Or you can take in a whole wallop of them and begin to sense the underlying structure that gives the glosa its . . . well, glisten.”
    — Alain C. Dexter

    Contributors of Crown Stanzas include
    John Milton
    Gavriel Navarro
    Herman Melville
    Friedrich Nietzsche
    Alfred, Lord Tennyson
    Charles Dickens
    Edgar Allan Poe
    John Donne
    Rumi

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGreyhart Press
    Release dateMar 13, 2013
    ISBN9781301196487
    Dead to Rights: A Circularity of Glosas
    Author

    Alain C. Dexter

    Alain C. Dexter is a professor of poetry at Brougham College and best-selling, heteronymic author of the award-winning Gizzard’s Luck & Other Organic Festivities, a collection of short stories; and the poetry collection, Poems from the Soles of his Feet. Dexter enjoys imported beer, hiking in the great Canadian north woods, and hobnobbing with the rich and famous. He appears as himself in Elaine Stirling’s novella of horror and good medicine, Dead Edit Redo, and lives on the north shore of Lake Superior. Alain C. Dexter photo: Kara Bobechko.

    Related to Dead to Rights

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Book

      Oct 30, 2019

      The Book
      20 min read

    • Article

      Let It Go

      Mar 17, 2020

      Let It Go
      4 min read

    • Article

      Lingering Memories

      Aug 5, 2021

      Lingering Memories
      4 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems

      May 1, 2022

      Proof your dream is true: seeingthe Prophet’s face. As a child in Mecca,I once imagined I saw him. We prayed for whole dayson rugs behind the concentric circles of people doing tawaf.White marble everywhere! Soon even the air looked hazywith light, s

      1 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Jul 1, 2023

      Alláde donde yo soy es el único lugardonde unopuede agarrarse de la noche—como de una baranda— para no caeren la oscuridad. There,where I come from, is the only place I knowwhere you cangrab the nightlike a railing to keep from fallingthrough the dar

      1 min read

    • Article

      ‘Long Time Coming’ Excavates The Origins Of Modern-day Racism

      Jan 12, 2021

      Michael Eric Dyson unfolds history to explain how the structures of slavery were transmuted into contemporary institutions and practices.

      2 min read

    • Article

      Decision [de-, Caedere-, Latin]

      Mar 1, 2024

      Life is a series of decisions to move this poster to another room; that ass to some other chair.There isn’t really much to it, and then we’re done for. There was a time I wrote, seriously, about grief. I wonder whyI can’t do that anymore. Maybe it’s

      2 min read

    • Article

      The Last Stop

      Oct 3, 2021

      The Last Stop
      1 min read

    • Article

      From The Feeling Sonnets

      Mar 1, 2022

      15. If Errato is the muse of poetry, who is the muse of music.No muse is the muse of music. Any muse is the muse of music.A muse is she musing about her meaning with music.Take meaning away from musing and all that remains is music.It is the music th

      3 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Jul 1, 2020

      She was a security guard and even though her uniform was black I could seeIt was covered in blood, the marble floor was covered in blood, it wasSlowly pooling out from the space where HER HAND used to beOh my god, I said, then I started to say, YOUR

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Mexican Engraver Reviving The Magical Imagery Of Chiapas

      Mar 25, 2020

      Mexico has a prolific tradition of printmaking, its defining visual characteristics having endured from pre-Hispanic times into modernity

      4 min read

    • Article

      No One Wakes Up Until We All Wake Up

      Aug 4, 2020

      Dear White People (including myself), It rips my heart out that I have had to craft yet another vapid statement about an awful, heartrending crisis showcasing our failure as white people. As Black people die, we white people make platitudes from our

      3 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Nov 1, 2018

      Moon river, swollen river, river of starholeand bright, harness river, lichen river,river we velvet with our filth.River of butter and river of witches, rivercracked open careful like egg, or burstapart, unleashing its violet load.River mouths, river

      2 min read

    • Article

      The Book I Kept for the Cover

      Apr 13, 2018

      The Book I Kept for the Cover
      5 min read

    • Article

      Letter To A Friend After Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s Testimony

      Jul 1, 2023

      I will never forget the first day of freshman English,when my teacher mentioned she was vegetarianand a pimpled boy in an orange-billed Giants cap asked whyin the way only teenagers do—ingenuine and genuineat the same time—and the teacher paused, con

      1 min read

    • Article

      In Science Fiction, We Are Never Home: Where technology leads to exile and yearning.

      Feb 10, 2021

      This essay first appeared in our “Home” issue way back in 2013. But somehow feels so timely today. Halfway through director Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, Sandra Bullock suffers the most cosmic case of homesick blues since Keir Dullea was hurled toward th

      8 min read

    • Article

      Nothingism

      Mar 1, 2019

      Nothingism
      11 min read

    • Article

      The Song Starts In My Body

      Nov 1, 2022

      I wanted to see her body. I’m aware it sounds strange, even lurid. What I wanted was to see her read her poetry, and her body reading it. Something about Rukeyser’s writing made me feel that she was at home in her flesh, and I wanted to see her lovin

      21 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Dead to Rights

    3/5

    6 ratings3 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 2/5
      Decent book but with limited appeal. I would only recommend this book if one has a love of poetry and/or familiarity with the authors contained within. Nevertheless, the author does have a lovely way with words.
    • 2/5
      This is an odd fish. At the end of the text I was neither moved nor engaged. Technically clever but none of the glosas moved me. I failed to see the point unless the references to Pessoa were meant to suck me into reading another of the heteronymic books to try and track down the position of these poems on a larger gloss.
    • 5/5
      This is my first Early Reviewer book, and what a delight to spend the last hour with something completely new, fast paced, witty and carefully constructed! I chose this book because as a former English major, now a busy mother to a large brood, i had hoped it would stretch me a little. But what i didn't anticipate was how much fun this book would be. One glosa i actually read aloud to my husband ("Haunted Yard Sale"), who laughed with me. The combination of images and word was like literary jazz, and it was just the right size to enjoy in an evening. I loved the footnotes, although they were half info, half riff. Thanks for sending me this book!

    Book preview

    Dead to Rights - Alain C. Dexter

    Contents

    Foreword: Glosa: isn’t that the floor wax they banned?

    scene divider

    1. South: Innocence

    Ostraka

    Oh, How We Danced Through The Effable!

    Venturing

    Unbreaking Fine Threads

    scene divider

    2. West: Chaos

    The Twisted Crew Of S.S. Disappointment

    Pleasers

    Siege

    The Minds That I Have Loved

    scene divider

    3. North: Wisdom

    A Branch Of Family Tree I Saw

    Freedom Is Not The Absence Of Slavery

    The Haunted Yard Sale

    Who Rides The West Wind

    scene divider

    4. East: Higher Ground

    The Quiver Of Inanna

    IP stands for Ice Point, don’t you know?

    Pots And Poetry

    Reviving The Blue Balloon

    scene divider

    5. Center: Mastery

    Meeting At The Bridge Of Quinametzin

    Beyonding Buddha: The World’s Greatest Lover

    scene divider

    Quatrain Contributors

    Acknowledgments

    About the Author

    FOREWORD

    scene divider

    Glosa: isn’t that the floor wax they banned?

    The British-Canadian humourist, whose name you’d recognize, was plying his trade as assiduously as I when we happened to share an elevator in Montego Bay at the 1st Annual PFFF! (Poetry for the Fun & Fearless Festival!) a few months ago.

    Why, yes it is, I said, playing along. I hope you didn’t buy any.

    Are you kidding? My wife was a distributor. Our floors were so buffed, you couldn’t take a step without cracking your head open. We had to hand out helmets at the front door for guests.

    We both laughed with that hic-cough of anxiety common to successful writers, artists and musicians who never quite trust the dream they’re living. But in a larger sense, my new friend had nailed it. The glosa is a poetry form buffed to a gleam so reflective, you don’t even know, your first stanza in, that you’ve been concussed.

    Glosas first entered our collective consciousness about nine hundred years ago, during what some call the Dark Ages, when European kings were warlords, dukes their boot-licking lackeys, and commoners fodder for whatever new war machines were being tested. The biggest employer in those days was the Crusades.

    In the midst of that lunacy were a group of poet-musicians known as troubadours, whose job it was to keep royals and their courtiers entertained, to pass intelligence from dukedom to dukedom, and to assuage terror in the villages and on the treacherous, bandit-riddled byways between them. Like their in-house peers, the jesters, troubadours, quite literally, survived by their wits.

    The competition to create new, exciting poetry forms was fierce. Some, like the ghazal, were already well established in the Persian and Arab worlds. Sonnets, those tight little fourteen-liners with intricate rhyme schemes, came later, and, like most poetic forms, served the medieval equivalent of corporate branding. Those in the know could tell you which kingdom or city-state a sonnet came from—Sicily, Venice, Genoa—by its themes and end rhymes. Those who didn’t know—well, you didn’t dare not know.

    The glosa, of which you will find eighteen in this book, originated in 12th century Spain. The verb, glosar, means both to gloss and to sum up. The glosero or glosera—female troubadours did exist—would pay tribute to master poets by borrowing four lines of their poetry. These served as the opening or crown stanza. The following four ten-line stanzas were crafted by the glosero; nine lines were his own, the tenth came from the opening quatrain. To blend the originating work with the new, the poet rhymed the end words of lines six and nine with the master

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1