Noel Black lives in Colorado Springs with his wife, artist Marina Eckler, and their son Ursen. Co-founder with Ed Berrigan of LOG Magazine and publisher of Angry Dog Midget Editions in the late 1990s, he has since worked as a writer and producer for a wide variety of media outlets including The Stranger and WNYC. He currently works as a producer for KRCC public radio. He is the author of half-a-dozen chapbooks including Hulktrans (Owl Press) and In The City of Word People (Blue Press, 2008).
Noel Black's Uselysses contains five discrete books of poems written over the last four years. Some of these are poems of experience. Others are night raids or open attacks on the reserves of meaning that, we're almost convinced, derive from properly appreciated experience; meanings we back on faith so we can keep having meaningful experiences in the future. As a radical questioner of such faiths, Black subjects his own skepticism to sufficient pressure to line a mine with prodigal kindness or absolute contempt, depending on the company. Most vital to the reader, his voice is clear throughout, natural, and the poems are fun to read over again. A peerless comic poet, Black's poems have appeared widely, but few of the poems in this book have been published anywhere until now.
