The Moon is only a foothold, a first step on the edge of a vast landscape. Humanity stands on the brink of a new era of exploration, in which brief, intermittent and tentative space jaunts could be replaced by a multitude of cosmic activities conducted by many competing interests. Within 20 or 30 years, crewed missions could make giant leaps toward Mars – 500 times further away than the Moon – to map out the terrain and even establish colonies. Asteroids and other distant destinations will be next. With this new age dawning, we face a collective responsibility to consider the moral challenges before us, and to avoid committing the grave mistakes of the past.
Weapon of war, language-game, act of restorative justice, conversation – erasure poetry can play all these parts and more. A branch of found poetry, erasure poetry starts from an existent document, obliterating parts of it to leave a new, slimmer text. While this type of verse is seeing a surge in popularity due to its “instagrammable” nature, cut-up and collage techniques have been around since the mid-20th century. And parody, the mockery of another poem by borrowing words and ideas and giving them a comic twist, must have existed long before poems were even written down.
“The Four Humors” is a novel about connecting the dots — between people, countries, and cultures. Sibel, the aspiring doctor, realizes she doesn’t just have a body, she is a body. And she doesn’t just have a feeling, she could be the feeling.
“The Four Humors” unites and transports the reader with a throat-tugging ending, demonstrating the power of stories to expand us all.
The book is a rare achievement – a scholarly reference work that invites reading for pleasure. Fox moves beyond colour as a study of materials with symbolic meanings, and his book, though no panegyric, places colour, and therefore art, at the heart of the human story.
For once we are together in the same room,
looking at each other in the blue kitchen light.
Our separate lives bookmarked and left
on read: paper sighing on the desk,