Print: Rain Taxi Review, Village Voice, Poets and Writers, Bloomsbury Review, Poetry Flash, American Poetry Review, Hudson Review, Poetry Project Newsletter, SF Bay Guardian, SF Chronicle, LA Times, LA Weekly, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Bookforum, Publishers Weekly, The Nation Web: completereview.com, conversationalreading.com, poems.com (Poetry Daily), Slate, Salon, Surrealist Review of Books (www.surrealistmovement-usa.org) Events: Alexander is an active reader and performer. Appearances in LA, San Francisco, New York, and elsewhere. Academic: The book has much potential course adoption through the poetry professor circuit. AWP, MLA, CBSD's Poetry & Lit Catalog.

The fifth volume of our Spotlight poetry series, Compression & Purity is a new collection of poetry by Los Angeles--based African American surrealist Will Alexander. Known for densely textured visionary epics influenced by poets like Aime Cesaire and Cesar Vallejo, Alexander here returns to shorter forms to address his ecological, cosmological, and historical concerns. Highlights include a monologue from the perspective of "The Blood Penguin," a song by the "New Water on Mars," and Alexander's autobiographical lyric essay, "My Interior Vita," describing the evolution of his artistic consciousness through jazz and surrealism. Compression & Purity confirms Alexander's reputation among surrealism's foremost contemporary practitioners.