A linguistic H-bomb playing darts with proximity; language as mellifluous combinatorial biomatter; a new semantic taxonomy Darwinian only by rhetorical hyperphagia; primordial puncture wounds in the semio-geographic record; a synthesis of the pre-modern and post-definition: this is Lexicartographies.
  Nicholas Alexander Hayes presents poetry as an adjacent atomic buzzing, webbed into momentary unison, each word spinning in its own cyclonic expression erstwhile comprising a solidity ultimately revealed to be fluid. The physics of un-definition is such that each particle morpheme accelerates with an associative velocity that tracts definition in its frictional wake, excising a theory of language characterized by play and driven by impulse. Rather than structural arrangement, there is viscosity, there is both spring and splatter. In your hand, a glob of paint is a glob of paint. Flung out of space and onto a canvas, it becomes art. Was art, then, an inherent faculty, brought about by applicative motion? Is there not art in its initial glob-ness, in its handed-ness? What is glob if not concentrated splatter? Splatter as decentralized glob? It's all paint as Lexicartographies is all words--there is a transformative potentiality chalked from the ecumenical mechanism of chance.
  What I found most interesting of this collection is its creation of a rhetorical biome, of structurally evolutive semantic constructs that bridge sound and placement by way of morphological association--there is a pervading sublime in bearing witness to something that moves so naturally, that snakes across the plain of the page and enjoins both in a symbiotic philology. The issue with definitive determinism in poetic theory is that meaning has always been made in the breaks--it is the absolution of multitude from wholes that requires the poetic subject to flight new heavens of definition. In clasping hands with un-being, we can finally whisper liturgies to a new semiology--that which periscopes the thing-in-itself from wan doldrums of egoic realism and exalts it to realms of playful signifiance and associative absurdity. 
  However, Lexicartographies is not absurd, necessarily, or rather, it is as absurd as the processional chaotics that comprise our natural world--it is absurd only in that it is out of our control. It is an autonomous semiotic organism, its own living, breathing, semantic apparatus whose analysis escapes normative frameworks as a newborn slips from its amniotic ensnarement--gristle-strewn, viscera-soaked, and ultimately unquestionably alive.
  The base poetic concept hinges on a relinquishment to the alacrity of association--if most poetry were to be chewed, Lexicartographies is to be sucked. Rolled around the tongue, coating each bud, a sensuous experience of evolutive interpretation. In correspondence with the poet, Hayes writes: "My intention was similar as a tongue to a pit, exploring the contours, textures, and what filaments of flesh remain. There was no interest in cracking them open with my molars or swallowing them to engage in digestion. There was no initial intention. There was infatuation with the word. If an intention developed, it was to use the experience of words to explore organically. Explorations based on chance helped destabilize the stolid character of these words." It is this stolidity of words that must be deconstructed to witness them in their entirety. The relationship between intention and meaning is such that in many instances, intention can cage meaning in a sort of predestination of signifiance, that intention as an applicative motion inherently aligns the poetic subject in accordance to intended presets, smothering possibilities of poetic property endemic to the thing-in-itself. Lexicartographies, on the other hand, eschews digestion for argots of libidinal detail, allowing the reader a receptive freedom equivalent to the sense of quiet awe one feels standing alone in the midst of an open field: of cicada shrieks and faint manures, of distant smog and rotting roadkill, at summer's end, surrounded by the fecundity of both life and death, you feel small, a part of it all.
  It is the interposition of the biologically base with the orthographically evolutive that epitomizes the collection--in other words, 'pursuing unknowledge by tickling a pretty little hole' ('ovipositor'). It is the physical demonstration of these natural processes not only in tandem, but interwoven, collated onto each other in fractal amalgamations that remind us of not only our irrefutable organic mechanisms, but, as refractory creatures, language, too, undergoes a similar process of structural organogenesis. That meaning can be wielded as organically as one wields their own body--that words can polyp meaning as plasm structures into embryo, as embryo branches into organism, as life, nascent and lush, succumbs to the morphemic deconstruction that is death–it is language as its own abyss. 
  Lexicartographies is more than a collection, it is a manifesto declaring the insufficiency of definition in an enzymatic culture of meaning particulates. It is language as a mirror, linguistic interrelation as automatic neural firing synergistic with natural operation. It is a bubbling up of previously inaccessed subconscious meaning, whose ectoplasmic arrangement divulges unconscious truths usually buried by egoic intention and derivation. It is poetry embodied, a bibliomantic golem of hieroglyphs and spiracles, whose veiny, pulsating creature oozes meaning from every vented pore. It is language that breathes.