Mark Lamoureux appeared in Issue 17 with Lapsang Souchong, a poem built from cold surfaces, color, glass, bodily presence, spatial distance, and a sense of motion slowed almost to suspension.
Mark Lamoureux in the historical archive
Issue 17 contributor note places Lamoureux within the original publication’s early experimental field. His poem draws its force from controlled visual detail and a sequence of physical impressions whose emotional charge remains concentrated rather than explained.
Lapsang Souchong
The title evokes smoke, warmth, and a distinctive sensory atmosphere, while the poem repeatedly turns toward coldness, glass, skin, distance, and stillness. These contrasts create a tense visual field in which physical objects seem both immediate and unreachable.
Color, glass, and surface
Lamoureux gives color and reflective surfaces unusual weight. Light moves across bodies and objects while glass mediates what can be seen. The result is a poem whose perception depends on surfaces, opacity, and the partial access one body has to another.
Slowed motion and distance
Movements feel delayed, stretched, or nearly frozen. The poem’s pacing lets gestures acquire pressure before the next image arrives. Spatial separation becomes emotional structure, with distance expressed through the time it takes an image to change.
Body, cold, and attention
The body remains central even when the poem’s attention shifts toward environment and object. Temperature, touch, color, and light keep returning perception to physical experience. This concentration gives the poem its restrained intensity.
Further reading
Continue through the archive’s pages on imagery in poetry, sound in poetry, and modern poetry.