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Critical Praise

• Colony Collapse Disorder is a book of journeys, journeys across the world, journeys of conscience and witness, journeys of spiritual discovery. Flynn is one of our finest contemporary troubadours, heir to Bop, to the Beats, the poetry of Rock and Roll, the roar of Walt Whitman, and the seduction of cinema. He is a poet of overwhelming energy, in rebellious ballads, stunning life riffs, and wry meditations. In this work we feel a relish for both improvisation and craft, in delicate lyrics of longing, in songs of protest, and progressive commentary on todays violent and chaotic news. Like the best music, Flynn's poems bind us together with a shared sense of failure, challenge, joy, and love.

  — Robert Morgan, author of Terroir

• Keith Flynn's lyrical travelogue, a revolution of sound and story, celebrates the reader as witness. Not only are we transported to gorgeously-crafted locales, but we are rooted there by the poet's unerring narrative, transforming each poem with a facet of light, an illuminative hallelujah. Scan the poetic landscape all you want, but you won't find anything like this.

  — Patricia Smith, author of Blood Dazzler

Reviews

• "Not to be missed"

  Midwest Book ReviewApril 2013
  What comes before the fall is a wound of some sort, and for some, the wound is more easily seen than others.... Colony Collapse Disorder is a fine assortment, not to be missed for contemporary poetry fans.

• To bee or not to be

  Smokey Mountain NewsApril 3, 2013

  Reviewed in the [Smokey Mountain News] by Thomas Crowe

  With its title Colony Collapse Disorder taken from a recent mysterious collapse of honeybee populations in North America, Keith Flynn's new collection of poems, while being entirely prescient in terms of the current social-political-economic situation here in the U.S., is anything but only local or nationalistic.

  In fact, it is quite the opposite. In the book's preface, Flynn imagines the great colonial powers of the world slowly topple while the Third World countries rise in rebellion. "Dictator or democracy?" Flynn asks. Then answers with a pithy reminder of the "brown population bomb" that lurks ever-present as population demographics rapidly change around the world.

  More than a book about social politics and remembering that "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts," this interlocked collection of poems describes a "place-based abecedarium in which each letter of the alphabet is represented by two places, cities, countries, or regions whose name corresponds to the letter and its assigned poem." Harkening back to Flynn's main arthropoda theme, Colony Collapse Disorder takes shape — the shape of the bee hive, and like poetry and music has shape in its inherent rhythms. In the end, what Keith Flynn has created, here, is quite amazing in terms of global scale and geopolitical perspective. Taking a page from James Joyce's Ulysses, which takes us everywhere while staying somewhere, this ambitious collection is unlike any other that I know. The word "ambitious" only begins to describe the content or the context of this collection. With this book Flynn shows off his intellectual curiosity and has taken a huge leap from previous volumes, becoming a global voice with a single stroke of the pen.

  I've watched Keith Flynn's journey — from regional lit magazine publisher, to an on-the-road performance poet with a national reputation, to now a voice for the global village. His tenacity and his focus are unsurpassed by anyone else I know of his generation (or possibly any generation). Like any athlete worth his salt, he has raised the bar for himself at every turn. He has, as the west coast poet Neeli Cherkovski has put it, "held the line."

  His determination as an editor, a presenter, and one who sits and writes as a solitary is phenomenal. And the proof of these claims I am making is in the pudding. The quality and quantity of work and miles logged by Flynn speak volumes — but none more eloquently and culturally conscious than the book we are considering here.

  Albert Einstein once wrote, "If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live." With this thought burning in the back of his mind, Flynn takes us in Colony Collapse Disorder on a trip around the world — from Flynn Branch Road and his birthplace of Madison County, to Havana, Cuba, to the Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador, to Australia and Osaka, Japan, to Belarus and to points in between. A rollercoaster ride around the planet that allows us to stop just long enough in each port-of-call to see into the practical and positive essences of each country's 'hive,' as well as its potential and/or reason for collapse.

  In Srinegar, Kashmir, the poem "The Force of Compassion" is one of the most beautiful and concisely conscious poems in the collection. Like Flynn, himself, who is a professional singer, this poem is about singing, about song.

  Sit with things and listen long
  and the singing will begin.
  Turn your free fall into
  a voluntary act. The song
  shattered, every being
  takes its piece of the harmony.
  The well of the past is bottomless
  and in the walls the song climbs
  out of the nets and jewels of time,
  the infinite unraveling mingled
  with bitter intervals of radiance,
  well water, lotus heart, rising crane.
  

  Here Flynn sounds a lot like one of his favorite poets, Paul Reverdy. Yet, there are hints from the Middle East of the poems of Hafiz and Kabir. Flynn has spent the past couple of years taking it all in — and writes here like the bioregional movement's slogan: "Think globally, act locally."

  From Haiti and the poem "A Navel in the Middle of the World" we are exposed to the daily realities of a population that has seen more than its share of disasters. "Bon appetit, like a navel/in the middle of the world,/but the quasi slow motion/gut punch of an earthquake/has embedded lifting landscapes...." And from Kigali, Rwanda, the poem The Reckoning. &the truth, that the living/are permanently enslaved/in whatever story they deign to tell,/an escalating wreck that drizzles/out into the air as the soul mists over,/wondering what next as the casualties/flame serenely on the path behind."

  But this isn't only a global landscape of gloom and doom from which Flynn draws his inspiration and his fascination. Flynn can also be philosophical. In the poem "The Agnostic" (Galapagos, Ecuador) he begins: "Nature selects for survival, Man, for appearance./ Our behavior evolves according to our needs./Science, at war with Religion, reveals our origin." And in "The Birth Mark" (Islamabad, Pakistan) we read the lines: "The same water/that cleanses, kills,/and the will/that erases the/coward, will make/him take a bullet/for his friend./Justify the world/and be confounded./That is the first law."

  And just as quickly and as easily as he can be philosophical Flynn can change his focus to the artistic, the creative. "If you are Chagall/then you believe that/fish can thresh wheat./If you are Rodin,/the gods are your/playthings and their/hands are perfect./The total work of art/is achieved through the/soul's inner necessity,/the way music persuades/without argument." (from Vitebsk, Belarus, in the poem "If You Are Chagall.") And we are there in Belarus where "the chimneys become/holy relics and the hills/raise their skirts and/cancan, with the trees/for legs and blue feet/built from pools of water,..."

  After a circumnavigating flight and a breathtaking view of the Earth (not unlike what the astronauts of Apollo 11 saw when looking back at our planet from the moon), Flynn brings himself and his readers back home — to Flynn Branch Road in Madison County, North Carolina — where we find ourselves "there in the bells of our bodies,/lolling in this hellish instant,/what infinite silence envelops us/as the soul sings, finding its voice/in the invisible springs between tones," and we see through the poet's eyes what he sees and envisions: "the mortar of stillness stiffening,/and my father, a quavering note/who has not risen, lives still."

  Finally, Flynn leaves us with this pithy epitaph of the place and the music that he knows better than any other — a poem appropriately entitled "The Blues."

  
  The dead name us,
  taking the first fork they find and bending it to suit
  their own peculiar path. Ever speak of this and their
  voices run wild. Just ask anybody, wandering
  half-lit by the moon on a country road at night,
  where the shadows announce themselves and
  disappear, their presence overblown in a land
  scape of broken ruses, and the ending is the blues.
  

  What can one say to such a naturally nostalgic insight as this, but "Amen!" And bravo to what Keith Flynn has undertaken and achieved in this collection. The appearance of Colony Collapse Disorder has surely launched Flynn's literary ship. We can only raise our hands to the sky and, like the rising crane, wish him bon voyage.

  ______
  Thomas Crowe is a poet and publisher of New Native Press. His upcoming collection of poems, Postcards From Peru, will be published this spring by Sol Negro Edicoes in Brazil. He resides in the Tuckasegee community of Jackson County and can be contacted at newnativepress@hotmail.com

• Flynn employs many mirrors to engender a hive mind

  The Read on WNCMarch 10, 2013

  Reviewed by Rob Neufeld in [The Read on WNC]

  Are you a "doe-eyed, pudding-faced daughter of fortune," or might you wish to wed one?

  The image comes to poet Keith Flynn when he visits 17th century Amsterdam, Holland7mdas;the epitome of middle-class society—in his worldwide hive of poems, Colony Collapse Disorder.

  "When the money first comes it seems a waterfall of silk," Flynn begins his Dutch poem, "Rembrandt's Mirror," imagining the painter's success in pleasing patrons, nabbing a wife, and collecting rarities for his studio before bankruptcy stripped him of all but his mirror.

  Flynn then jumps to an image of Christmas tree ornaments, "whose mirrored surfaces fill with your shadow/ and shatter, razored carols waiting for your bare feet to clatter through."

  Vivid trip

  Flynn's metaphorical agility and vividness transport you from one revelation to another. Combine that with his global view, and you've got an epic hosanna to creation performed within a roiling hell.

  In Dharamsala, India, "The morning star enlightened Buddha/ and his first words formed a poem/ out of the desperate ardors."

  In El Paso, Texas, the poet witnesses a man in a coma sucking on a remembered cigarette, and pictures Death as a be-bopper: "It leaves a hole, doesn't say/ please, walks with a swagger and takes its toll,/ blows a smoke ring into the fan and watches it roll."

  "C'mon, people," you can imagine Flynn's poems saying, "the dance of life is so great—why so much meanness?"

  In the El Paso poem—titled, "The Future of an Illusion"—Flynn zaps us with a hip theology: "If God lived on Earth, people would break/ His windows, egg His barely moving electric car,/ step on His robe, and call him a fag at the mall."

  Why is that? It goes back, for Flynn, to an inheritance from his father, as he reveals in a rare autobiographical poem, "Assuming the Conception," set on Flynn Branch Road, North Carolina.

  Facing the demon

  "My body turned 45, and the wheels/ fell off," he begins, facing death's visage.

  "Lolling about in this Hell,/ old bird, your beak numbly clacking,/ clenched around a twig whittled/ to the size of a cigarette, you will not succumb to this institution's whitewashed/ viral simplicity, its bardic death-head."

  Flynn has developed a career as a rock band leader, as well as editor (Asheville Poetry Review) and producer (White Rock Hall, Madison County).

  I'd like to assign an animator to his case. The voice-over in the movie version, at times, would be a kind of god who seems to take a delight in human suffering.

  "The university of adversity," the poet's father had crowed, the Flynn Branch poem tells. "The soul sings," the poet rejoins, "and my father, a quavering note/ who has not risen, lives still."

  Web awareness

  Colony Collapse Disorder, with all its travel, has a local grounding; but that is only the roosting spot in a web that reaches as far as Kubla Khan.

  Flynn's connection with the cosmos pre-dates the Internet, and has poets such as William Blake and Allen Ginsberg to thank. It is interesting, therefore, to read his take on modern connectivity in his poem, "Facebook," set in Queens, New York, apparently after the location of an anonymous female correspondent.

  "Perhaps I could be the high altitude tree, she says, sauntering about/ miles above your giant wooly rodent, or a cobalt-colored toad the size/ of a pea, with torrid little wings that purred like turbines as I wound/ around the breeze of your argument."

  "Without our bodies we cannot love," Flynn comments; and compares web information to a billion Pony Express ponies "steaming at the same time into a town riddled with mirrors."

  He also calls the profusion "a barrage of bait"; and we are like "a giant gray tarantula in early evening,/ tense with near-misses and brilliant collisions, its movement as frantic as its mind."

  Reasons to reach

  Why do we read Flynn, beyond the pleasure of his phantasmagoria? Why do his gymnastics, pain, and vision resonate with us? He explains the serious intent well in his preface.

  The title of his new volume "is taken from the strange occurrence, discovered in 2006, that began to happen to America's honeybees"—a perfect storm of viruses. "The few bees to survive were reeling, and wandering, without purpose, like survivors of a terrifying apocalypse. Great lobes of the hive mind had died."

  The connection between bees, pollination, and our food supply is not difficult to draw. "It occurred to me," Flynn writes, "that this was an ideal metaphor for our current global circumstance." The metaphor also influenced the design of the book.

  Each of 52 poems, "built in a circular fashion like a Mayan calendar," and like a hive, attempts "to capture a sense of what a worker bee might see through the eyes of a human." Colony collapse.

  Flynn hopes that readers, travelling "around the world in eighty or so pages," will reach out "with a new awareness of the other spirits that are occupying their hive."

• "complex yet elegant"

  Jasper (Univ. of South Carolina)Feb 2013

  Reviewed in the [Jasper, Vol. 002 No. 003]

  Reviewed by Zach Mueller

  Keith Flynn's new poetry collection, Colony Collapse Disorder (Wings Press, 2013), has one foot in language and the other in place, albeit with incredibly long legs. His fifth collection, this book sprawls the globe, moving through different countries, cities, cultures, climates, civilizations, and perspectives. Flynn offers two poems for every letter of the alphabet, and each poem is presented alongside a corresponding location for the beginning letter of that place. (For example: G: Gaza, Palestine; Grand Canyon, Arizona. S: Linares, Spain; San Francisco, California.) The scope is immense geographically, but also in its attempt to put disparate mythologies in dialogue. Each poem is informed by the influence of regional culture, however that might be definedsometimes by history, sometimes by literature, sometimes by the stories that linger in the sound of footsteps walking through East Asia or the mountains of Georgia. (Truly, the table of contents is an overwhelming treasure map unto itself.)

  The poems leave traces on one another, removing the vast distance between these places and times. "Speaking In Tongues" (Collodi, Italy) retells Pinnochio; "Lincoln's Life Mask" (Springfield, Illinois) reimagines Lincoln's lifework; there are intonations of Henry VIII, Charles Darwin, the Virgin Mary, Catherine of Sienna (disguised as Yogi Berra), among many, many others. But these visions are frequently borrowed to explore a completeness of humanity, some sense of larger narrative that all places share regardless of border. And signifiers are not limited to geography and history. There are religious ones as well: Agnosticism in Ecuador; Zen in India; Easter in Gaza. The poems collect different names and resonances to create a complex yet elegant vision of cultural narrativesometimes painful, but always human.

  Flynn captures the fluidity of negotiation in "European Political Discourse:"

  A vivid first feast of wind, 
  purity in the form of coercion, 
  lards the crisp air with recognition, 
  
  and those tarred thereafter harden 
  with resolve. Success has many fathers,
  they say, but failure is an orphan. 
  

  Here and throughout, Flynn is able to render language as sacred, the visage of wisdom and beauty, resistant to cynicism and irony. Formally, the poems are full bodies of words and rhythm on the page, almost like beds of different shapes, sizes, and luxuries. Language provides the pillows and blankets we lie on, creating a unifying rhythm, a current that navigates these landscapes, both literal and metaphorical, in such a way that you feel safe enough to contemplate and imagine worlds that you might not otherwise be willing to visit.

  Flynn is also a musician, and it shows with his ability to craft poems that move like music. He situates soft rhymes in "Rembrandt's Mirror" with phrases like "mauzy gaudiness" and "Italian baubles and Grecian columns" that not only negotiate competing sonic textures, but cultures as well. In "Nearing Havana," the speaker finds himself in Cuba, presenting a multi-dimensional political uneasiness: The East Germans say that the Chinese/should understand Berlin. It's a moment early on in Colony Collapse Disorder that gestures towards an overwhelming task of balance. But just when the path seems constricted, he offers a breath (and a revision of Robert Frost): "something within that doesn't trust a fence,/ sees a pathway in a pile of bricks." These pockets of air fill our lungs, in and out, allowing us to breath an entire world all at once.

  North Carolina poet Flynn is the author of The Talking Drum, The Book of Monsters, The Lost Sea, and The Golden Ratio, as well as the editor and founder of The Asheville Poetry Review. Colony Collapse Disorder, to be released in March 2013, is his fifth collection.

  Copyright 2013 by Jasper Magazine.

  Zach Mueller received his MFA in poetry from the University of South Carolina in 2012. He writes poetry, short fiction, and is working on his first novel. He lives and teaches composition in Columbia, SC.

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