Chasing Names on Nameless Water

Ken Meisel contemplates the fluidity of identity, beginning with man's inhumanity toward man. The opening ekphrastic poem recalls the slaughter of women and girls in 1942, during World War II, outside the Mizocz Ghetto, where one of the underling killers starts his day by spreading jam on bread. It is a tender and horrifying story about the multiplicity of Self: the suffering we experience, juxtaposed with the discovery of Splendor. These poems are essentially escape routes from brutality through profound portraits of love, empathy, and sweetness, inspired by art, music, even youthful thievery. Where Shakespeare says that "all the world's a stage," Meisel describes the way "a body learns [that] faux identity is part" of this performance. Identity shape-shifts until love takes us into reverent silence. He shows us how "doubt is agnostic: but love...is faithful & holy & it's eternal."

-Joy Gaines-Friedler, author, Capture Theory and Secular Audacity

Identity is a human construct - fluid, malleable, and ultimately unfixed - while violence, loss, and love shape our perception of ourselves and others. Through a dance of transformation, Ken Meisel reveals identity as both costume and conduit, whose spirit stretches beyond form to touch freedom. To seek understanding is beautiful and necessary, yet fleeting. Chasing Names on Nameless Water reflects on the beauty of not knowing. As Ken writes, "you cannot fill up horror with this false emptiness; you must own what you are. We are confused actors; we must see what we do. Only then will we be able to cease injuring ourselves." With a good dose of drugs, sex, and rock and roll, reflections on a dead hamster and middle age, and a handful of elegies on Zoom and Buddha, Ken asserts that true understanding of life and identity comes only after suffering hardship: "By love we come alive."

-Linda K. Sienkiewicz, author, Sleepwalker

Ken Meisel's a poet with a sure sense of history, its damning consequences, and the anachronistic ways we have to walk back through it. Chasing Names on Nameless Water is a book rich with references - to history, to pop culture, to psychoanalysis, to music. It's got that Midwestern grit to it, paired with a polymathic intelligence. When reading Meisel's verse "you shall be struck in the mouth by the heat / of the labyrinth, by the vast multitudes, / by beauty, you will be clothed in it."

-Cal Freeman, author, The Weather of Our Names