Reading Will Alexander’s poetry is like walking into a Jackson Pollock painting: you get lost in a maelstrom of colors, lulled by beautifully constructed metaphors, and unexpectedly shaken by the jarring sounds of each hard-handed stroke. Through Alexander’s work, words fill three-dimensional forms and talk back to you with distinct colors, voices and angles. An autodidact born and raised in South Central L.A., Alexander’s early work didn’t fit into conventional, academically defined structures. After years of carving out his own niche, Alexander is now internationally recognized as a leading literary figure. A poet, essayist, novelist and visual artist, his accomplishments include the Whiting Fellowship for Poetry in 2001 and a California Arts Council Fellowship in 2002, and he was named by The International Biographical Centre in Cambridge as the Outstanding Scholar of the 20th Century. Alexander’s most recent collection of poetry, The Sri Lankan Loxodrome, is a surreal adventure embedded with a lexicon all its own and laced with seemingly disconnected words applied to the page like that of smattered paint.

“It is underground because we are not supposed to exist,” he explains.

When they left, when they trotted off to play war
They were fresh, from some mid-west high school,
Athletic letterman’s jackets and class rings
they love to sing songs their father sung when they were young
when they were their age, when they were fresh
Classic melodies, timeless harmonies
Sung off key by 4 South Dakota boys in a poorly armored Humvee
45 mph down a dusty Baghdad street
the words removed them briefly from the anxiety, the intensity
the propensity of bullets and bombs gravitating towards American soldiers
the tune soldiers on from cautious voices

I’ve lived in Los Angeles for a little over three years.
In that time, I’ve paid almost $1,000 in parking tickets.

Once upon a time a city was erected, and when the neon lights were turned on, the people came in droves. Their dreams were advertised to them wholesale and everyone clamored over each other to buy them. When they realized these were not the dreams they wanted, the people turned to each other for meaning. But before they could embrace, fault-lines in the earth tore apart, separating them, and these chasms were filled-in with highways roaring with traffic. Alas, the people found themselves isolated on concrete islands with no way to reach each other. They now make up the permanent and wounded infrastructure of this city. They had loved and destroyed Los Angeles. . . and Los Angeles had returned the favor.