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About the Book About the Author
An Offprint Compendium From An Emotional Orphan.
Reprising the art of broadside poetry, and combining it
with todays new media and the truth of experience.
Jack Varnell is a contemporary prose poet & writer living in the suburbs of Atlanta, Ga. USA
Usually writing under the pseudonym "The Emotional Orphan", and predominantly an online writer, he has been published at Culture Sandwich, The Literary Burlesque, Verses In Motion, Undead Poets Society, Sick Of 'Em, Pigeonbike Poetry, Red Fez. and an ongoing list of others.
Print Selections include Unadorned Press, Guerilla Pamphlets , Popshot Magazine, & many others. He was included in "All The King's Horses-Volume 3" in the 'Expression of Depression' anthology series from LittleEpisodes/Little Brown Book Group in the UK. He is the author of two published volumes of art and poetry-prose.
Jack is also a prolific, and well respected Mobile Photography artist.
Jack's blog is Emotional Orphan.
If you would like to discuss commissions, partner, or writing opportunities, or if you would like to purchase an art edition of "The Lexicon Of The Orphanage", please send a tweet or contact him via the emotionalorphan.net contact page.
Editorial Reviews
“Too often, since Ginsberg, have the annals of confessional poetry been populated by the kind of insipid, self-indulgent
knee-jerk narcissism that passes for the genre these days. Too often, since
Bukowski, has the term ‘out-law poetry’ been wheeled to justify screeds of
rigourless egoism, and the appellation of ‘out-law poet’ as a pose, a prop in
said poet’s on-going orgiastic festival of shameless self-promotion. Too long.
But no more.
No more because here, happily, is a poet
who understands that true poetry comes at the expense of the self, who writes
without mercy but with great mindfulness; who understands that tender and raw,
razed and raised are two sides of the same condition. Jack Varnell doesn’t
offer, solely, a straight narrative or description of events but a
re-experience. There are no vicarious, voyeuristic thrills here, but an
invitation to access alongside the poet the darkest nadirs and brightest
air-thin zeniths of being human.
In this way the collection vigorously
eschews the navel-gazing all too familiar to modern poetry. It exalts, most of
all, in communication, in establishing a connection between the writer and the
reader and shocking the latter from their passive art-imbibing complacency.
Jack Varnell has an extraordinary grasp of the philosophy of image and the
strange sympathies that exist between visual art and the printed word. The
result is a bold body of work, accessible, resonant and stunning; the complete
package somehow more than the sum of each exquisite part. Without constructing
a flat, linear narrative, the poet nevertheless builds in a deep sense of
story, of history, that gives pleasing texture to the work."
- U.K. Poet-Author, Fran Lock -
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"The Lexicon of the Orphanage is an impressive debut collection by poet/artist Jack Varnell.While it’s only 24 pages, this work is dense with original art and photography that accompanies each poem. For those new to Jack’s work, I’d classify the poetry in this collection as narrative/memoiristic. Often in narrative poetry the writer tends to ramble a bit – to clear the throat a tad too much – but in TLOTO there are more often moments of concision and carefully-crafted subtlety..."
-Cameron Conaway, Editor, Poetry Book Review, Examiner.com-
