Close Your Eyes, Visions

When we close our eyes, we see things.

When we close our eyes, we see things. Colors and shapes, images, even visions. In Close Your Eyes, Visions, poet Michael Ruby explores this common yet overlooked phenomenon. The two texts in the book extend into the visionary realm Ruby’s trilogy Memories, Dreams and Inner Voices (Station Hill, 2012), which chronicled the fleeting memories, dream narratives and fragmentary conversations that also occasionally reach consciousness. The first text, Close Your Eyes, is a series of 45 prose poems dominated by kaleidoscopic colors and shifting shapes, ending with a meditation on the relationship between light and darkness. The second text, Visions, begins when Ruby learns how to see brief visions by focusing on areas of turbulence in the dark visual field. He chronicles these visions in poetic lines that unfold at the pace of the visions themselves, beginning with an old car parked outside a candy store in East Orange, N.J., and ending with a blue sports car poking out onto a country road in upstate New York. Between these two endpoints, early childhood and sudden death, a world of visions awaits. Taken together with the surrealist researches in Ruby’s trilogy, these works are a guide for readers to some of the most elusive productions of the human mind.

＂Michael Ruby has done us a great service. He’s put into words some of his hypnagogic visions so we can see and read them. These are the images we see behind closed eyes while falling asleep--unexplainable dots and designs, movements, things that look like something, it’s entertainment.... We thank Michael Ruby for venturing to explore this territory and enlarging the number of things we can write about. One of his best constraints is to refer to the visual field, eyes closed, as the world. Let’s go see what’s happening in that white, maroon, red, yellow and green world, but be careful, the sun might be too bright to continue.＂--Bernadette Mayer, reviewing Close Your Eyes in the Poetry Project Newsletter

Poetry.

Michael Handler Ruby is a poet, literary editor and journalist. He is the author of seven other full-length poetry collections, including At an Intersection (Alef Books, 2002), Window on the City (BlazeVOX [books], 2006), The Edge of the Underworld (BlazeVOX, 2010), Compulsive Words (BlazeVOX, 2010), American Songbook (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013), The Mouth of the Bay (BlazeVOX, 2019) and The Star-Spangled Banner (Station Hill Press, 2020). His trilogy in prose and poetry, Memories, Dreams and Inner Voices (Station Hill, 2012), includes the e-books Fleeting Memories (Ugly Duckling, 2008) and Inner Voices Heard Before Sleep (Argotist Online, 2011). He is also the author of the ebook Titles & First Lines (Mudlark, 2018) and five chapbooks with the Dusie Kollektiv. He co-edited Bernadette Mayer’s collected early books, Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words (Station Hill, 2015), and Mayer’s and Lewis Warsh’s prose collaboration Piece of Cake (Station Hill, 2020). A graduate of Harvard College and Brown University’s writing program, he grew up in South Orange, N.J., and lives in Brooklyn.