We’ve all had the brief scare of having a white slip on our windshield — we’ve all had the relief of realizing it’s just an ad for Joe’s Eatery. But now, because of damage to cars and increased litter, the issue is going to the Supreme Court.

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.

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.