Charles Freeland
Charles Freeland is Professor of English at Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio. He has twice received the Individual Excellence Award in Poetry from the Ohio Arts Council.
"Charles Freeland has this uniquely irreverent voice, and he invents his own textures, hand-paints his own landscapes just to satisfy his craving (or curiosity or whatever it is that he writes for). I do not see any effort to entertain, to convince, or to horrify. And for that, he has my utmost respect and admiration."
-- Kristine Ong Muslim
*** The contents of most of the books listed here have been collected in Up Jumped the Apparatus, available as a free pdf file toward the bottom of this page. ***
Book Length Poems:
Eucalyptus
To purchase a copy from Otoliths, click here.
"In which we are invited to witness the protean prose of Charles Freeland as it enters and bends around our improbably porous bodies like smoke from a library fire. Until one can no longer tell where one’s limbs or eyelashes begin and the author’s sentences end. If either can, in fact, be said to begin or end at all. Pick any one of Freeland’s expertly carved sonic doorknobs and turn to open. The room waiting there contains the very universe, if not the socks, you’re standing in right now. Beyond which: “The doors to the research labs fly open and when you peer inside there are still more doors and probably more doors inside those…"
"In which we are invited to witness the protean prose of Charles Freeland as it enters and bends around our improbably porous bodies like smoke from a library fire. Until one can no longer tell where one’s limbs or eyelashes begin and the author’s sentences end. If either can, in fact, be said to begin or end at all. Pick any one of Freeland’s expertly carved sonic doorknobs and turn to open. The room waiting there contains the very universe, if not the socks, you’re standing in right now. Beyond which: “The doors to the research labs fly open and when you peer inside there are still more doors and probably more doors inside those…"
—Travis
Macdonald
Eros and (Fill in the Blank)
To purchase a copy from BlazeVox, click here.
"Charles Freeland dances under moonlight. The landscape for his delightfully curious insights is visual, symbolic, a work of art and an advanced warning dusted with allusion, playfulness and literary confidence. A poem in prose, an epistolary project, Eros unspools advice wise, subversive and funny; very funny. Sentences tumble, one after the other. Truth rides shotgun to contradiction. I suspect James Joyce has placed an advanced order for this book-length paragraph of lilting depth and joy, as well as Charles Bernstein, Charles Simic, Lee Ann Brown, Frank O'Hara and assorted scholastics and philosophers. Freeland is Polonius on acid. Unlike Polonius, the author is advantaged by having read the tragedy's fifth act while simultaneously knowing pleasures of sensation and the “fact of the human body. Its shape like the modest ginger root.” As only passionate careful writers can do, Freeland offers his readers – you and you and you – his brimming heart on his well-tailored sleeve. On our “advanced planet” Psyche is in danger, Eros cautions – though worth much regard. How bright Freeland's moon."
— Sarah Sarai
Chilean Sea Bass is Really Just Patagonian Toothfish
Free ebook (to access click here)
"How do we discern the truly essential ingredients?" asks Charles Freeland in this passage that serves up a combination platter of the frivolous and the significant with a rhythm reminiscent of life itself. Cultural detritus pollutes the field of our vision in the form of junk food, bar codes, and phantom pains. Natural landscapes are filtered through a force field of attention deficit disorder. What gets lost and what remains visible in this land of distractions and information overload mode? Sometimes it seems "we only register when something is amiss". This piece moves in a way that captures both the suppression and surprising expressions of the day to day; the chugging routine and the startling little rifts in the routine, when suddenly a truly singular image or genuine moment comes to the forefront and asserts its own unique individuality."
-- Juliet Cook
Albumen
Prose by Charles Freeland, Artwork by Rosaire Appel.
Free ebook. Contents can be accessed in the collected pdf file entitled Up Jumped the Apparatus found toward the bottom of this page, or via the Internet Archive here)
To purchase a print copy from PressRappel (designed by Rosaire) click here.
Albumen casts its spell using disparate elements. Bits of folk tale and nursery rhyme, the surrealist prose poem, asemic writing, the gothic novel and philosophical speculation -- in Albumen the protean prose of Charles Freeland combines with the haunting, enigmatic graphics of Rosaire Appel to create a unique, book-length work of art.
Bad Luck Mérimée (abandoned, not collected)
Parts i-iii click here.
>Instrument<, Parts iv & v click here.
Collections:
Through the Funeral Mountains on a Burro
To purchase a copy from Otoliths, click here.
"Charles Freeland employs narrative sequence as a mode of aspiring to innocence. Each of these deceptively direct prose pieces, "embracing that infinity," is replete with power to endure what finally endows the conscious mind with revelations disguised as moments. Freeland’s wry humor, charged observations, sonorous lines ("Eulalie stands thigh deep in the river"), remind us of our privilege "just to catch the echo of it, the way children sometimes catch crayfish on the end of a sharpened stick." One final word for Freeland: `Encore!'"
— Sheila E. Murphy
Deviled Ham and a Picture of Jesus
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Original edition is out of print. Contents can be accessed in the collected pdf file entitled Up Jumped the Apparatus found toward the bottom of this page, or via the Internet Archive here.
"Outrageous and eccentric, colorful and immediately engaging, Grubb, the center of Charles Freeland's new collection, takes us through his odd but totally convincing world, genuinely a second universe, even if "he knows it is only the wind and the wind has no words." Grubb reminds us of Ellison's invisible man, Snyder's mythic turtle holding up the fragile world, and Kerouac's Dr. Sax, all strong presences who are in but not of the common condition, and thus able to get a real bead on us. Freeland brings us fresh perspectives here, ones we will not immediately understand, but ones we will believe, and this is the bedrock of art."
-- Heather Ross Miller
Slow Codex
Free ebook. Original link is broken. Contents can be accessed in the collected pdf file entitled Up Jumped the Apparatus found toward the bottom of this page, or via the Internet Archive here.
Five Perfect Solids
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Free ebook. Original link is broken. Contents can be accessed in the collected pdf file entitled Up Jumped the Apparatus found toward the bottom of this page, or via the Internet Archive here.
Variations on a Theme by Spinoza
Free ebook (to access click here)
"In Charles Freeland's Variations on a Theme by Spinoza, the poet makes flesh the 17th-century philosopher's mind/body/emotions-as-divine issues for an audience familiar with the significance of `unguarded messages on the phone.' Fascinating parts - the piety of lust, an impartial, broken-hearted God - strive to equal the sublime oneness that consumed one of our greatest minds. Badass, but also a little lonely, no?"
-- Chris Vola
Furiant, Not Polka
Free ebook. Original link is broken. Contents can be accessed in the pdf file entitled Up Jumped the Apparatus found toward the bottom of this page, or via the Internet Archive here)
"In retrospect it's quite impressive and noteworthy how Freeland many years in advance anticipates, and comments with eerie prescience on this rising menace we now contend with globally and locally, of that jackboot to the face Orwell perceived and lived in constant fright of, which continues to strike down our brothers and jeopardize our sisters' bodily autonomy more egregiously with each passing day. An important collection, which has aged like a fine vintage, Furiant is more topical and glaringly relevant today than at the time of its composition and proves the poet to be far-sighted and oracular, well understanding our society's trending and the disturbing shape of things to come..."
-- Jerome Berglund
The Case of the Danish King Halfdene
free ebook (to access click here)
Where We Saw Them Last
Free ebook. Original link is broken. Contents can be accessed in the pdf file entitled Up Jumped the Apparatus found toward the bottom of this page, or via the Internet Archive here
"This ranks in my top ten of best poetry chapbooks. Where We Saw Them Last is an unflinching look at grief, alienation, and love."
-- Kristine Ong Muslim
"All in all some of Freeland's most accessible yet incendiary work yet. If you don't really know chapbooks or read poetry, this might make a fine introduction and place to start to see what all greatness you're missing."
-- Jerome Berglund
Eulalie & Squid
Free ebook (to access click here)
Eulalie & Squid
Free ebook (to access click here)
Six Kinds of Weather
Free ebook. Original link is broken. Contents can be accessed in the collected pdf file entitled Up Jumped the Apparatus found toward the bottom of this page, or via the Internet Archive here.
The Modigliani is on Loan
A free ebook:
One (click here)
Two (click here)
Three (click here)
Collected Poems, 1990-2023, free ebook. Place cursor at bottom of the screen below to enable scrolling. For best viewing, use the pop-out function at top right of the screen to open in a separate window.
"Charles Freeland's poetry can kick up like a hard wind, or carry like a dirge from some familiar yet unnamed hurt. The reader would be obliged to pull at his collar and turn away were the words not so brutally urgent, the song so tragically beautiful. Freeland is, simply put, one of the very finest writers out there."
-- Jamey Dunham
Available also on the Internet archive here.
