About The Icarus Sketches / The Icarus Series

The Icarus Sketches / The Icarus Series is a collaborative chapbook by Crystal Boson and myself, published by Seven Kitchens Press in late 2009. Each of us wrote a sequence of poems based on the Icarus myth, but our approaches were somewhat opposite. Crystal’s poems are dense in terms of language, tightly-coiled, expressly mythic (the minotaur and the gods are on display here) and are similar to each other in form. Mine are simple in terms of language but vary greatly in style and subject matter, including Icarus as an embryo and an interview between Icarus and Orville Wright. The chapbook itself is nicely put together – turn it one way, and you get Crystal’s poems; flip it over and begin again, and you get mine.

Cover Image

Sample Poems

Icarus the Young

Schematic embryo. Star-crossed fetus.
Small as a period, a cluster of cells could not stop
growing, could not but motion slowly
in the unnamed womb; were molded
by flesh-electric waves, programmed
with illusions of a user, else we might
say these cells would soon be tricked
into the light, as though any had choice
in the face of the atomic.

Icarus Interviews Orville

I: Were you close?
O: Wilbur and me? Closer than any brothers you’d ever meet. We even married sisters.
I: I mean to the sun.
O: Well, I was only ten feet off the ground that first time.
I: Did you feel the heat?
O: It was December.
I: …
O: Wilbur had the most controlled flight – 853 feet.
I: …
O: Of course, it wasn’t our only attempt.
I: …
O: …
[Interviewer leaves]
O: Yes, in all my veins, I felt it.