Spanking new from award-winning Kansas City writer, Debra Di Blasi:
"Agitated, angry, inventive, iconoclastic, both literally and figuratively graphic, the real Jiri Cech would both revere and rape Emily Dickinson, then bottle all the blue flies she ever imagined and make a balm to annoint the body of his beloved. Or at least the object of his desire. Here is a series of tales, in varying keys, of intoxication and revenge, intoxication with whatever seduces, revenge for being seduced. An oblique memoir of family, an investigation of a mother's misplaced life, flirtation with self-advertisement in the manner of supermarket tabloids, and above all the Chronicles of Jiri Cech, seducer supreme, rogue chauvinist, lover and enemy. Beware, reader, you're in for a sumptuous, hypertextual, hypercharged ride. Hyperion himself would smile." – David Hamilton, editor of The Iowa Review
"Cech thrives on barraging the viewer with anti-traditional objects, purposely offensive commentary and ruthless political satire, providing a not-so-subtle reminder of the harsher side of our contemporary dialogue.*
Jiri Cech is a primary or peripheral subject in many short stories and articles, including "Czechoslovakian Rhapsody Sung To the Accompaniment of Piano" and "Glauke's Gown", published in The Iowa Review (Dec. 2000 and April 2002, respectively), "Oops. Sorry" published in Notre Dame Review (Summer 2003), and "Machine Ghosts" published in Drunken Boat (Fall 2006).
Jiri's poetry has appeared in literary journals and has been adapted to video and hip hop. His first book, Whither: poems of exile, won the Mennstrausse Poetry Award. His second collection, Comes Life, is a limited edition wherein each chapter is shot through with a different weapon and contains the spent lead from a bullet. The poems chronicle events from September 11, 2001, to the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq through poetic voices ranging from God and the Adversary, to the widowed and deserted, soldiers and politicians, and nameless casualties of combat. Poems are excavated from books of the Old Testament and reshaped to reflect the sometimes brutal, sometimes sumptuous emotions of people affected by current events.
"Cech's vision of war and its consequences are unrelenting and unrepentant. COMES LIFE is a raw, haunting chronicle sure to become a poetic landmark of our time." (Paul van Ossel, Poetry Strafe)
A limited edition revision of Comes Life includes real bullets shot through the text, packaged with the spent lead.
Jiri's art therapy drawings have become an explosive sensation in the art world, many reproduced in the book, When the Bluebird of Happiness Shits on Your Armpit. His clothing of boxer shorts ("not your ordinary dick"), tee shirts (example:"fast loud stupid") and dessicated garlic nekclaces are worn by celebrities around the world.
A BRIEF HISTORY
Jiri was born in Czechslovakia, where once Bohemia flourished. From the age of 13 he carried on an incestuous affair with his sister who became pregnant, presumably with his child. The child was born with half a heart and lived only long enough to be christened Jiri's name. Still a teenager, Jiri Cech fled Soviet occupation in 1968, along with thousand of other Czechs, and survived as a refugee in Switzerland by exchanging sex for food, beer and paper on which to write poetry. He arrived in the United States in 1971 where he is now a successful businessman, specializing in new construction and real estate development (i.e., suburban sprawl). Although he is an unrepentant capitalist, he is particularly annoyed by neocons, believing they represent the decline of the American idea[l] of misbehaving in privacy without the KGB breathing down your pants. He enjoys his patriotic right to practice vampirism between consenting adults and, therefore, lives in New York City.
WHAT THE CRITICS HAVE TO SAY:
"Some poets become mythic figures only after they die. Emily Dickinson, for example, who didn't exist at all during her lifetime, and the interest of whose poetry derives in part from her radical awareness of that fact. Others live only as mythic figures: Jiri Cech is such a poet.... 'It's A Man's World,' sums up the poems that precede it and foreshadows those that follow, for Cech writes only as a man would." -- H.L. Hix, National Book Award finalist in Poetry, and author of As Easy As Lying: Essays on Poetry and Perfect Hell, winner of the T.S. Eliot Award
"Jiri Cech's poetry cuts deep and straight to the intestines, an evisceration you can't survive without reconstructive surgery of the heart. A triumph of the will to survive!" -- Ricard Biderét
"Artist Jiri Cech, a self-proclaimed businessman and vampire from Czechoslovakia, filled a small room with his capitalist-inspired limited edition T-shirts, postcards, CDs, art therapy sketches and autographed underwear, each one a mimicry of the unspoken rule that art should not be understood primarily as a marketable commodity. Cech thrives on barraging the viewer with anti-traditional objects, purposely offensive commentary and ruthless political satire, providing a not-so-subtle reminder of the harsher side of our contemporary dialogue." -- Robin Trafton, art critic, The Kansas City Star
"What distinguishes Cech's poetry is his idiosyncratic use of the English language, reminiscent of zen koans and British privet mazes in which everyone is naked. Getting lost is half the fun!" -- Antonia Ruiz
"Never before has a poet confessed so much -- and had so much to confess. Jiri Cech's brutal self-examination is a breath of fresh air after a slow-burning chemical fire. A remarkable achievement!" -- Prague Independent News
"Poignant, sinful and refreshingly without remorse. Thank God (or Satan) for Jiri Cech! A poet who doesn't hide behind the facade of counterfeit morality so prevalent in today's American poetry." -- Der Blauehai Zeitung
"One certainty from Cech's installation is that his work is conceptually engaging without being dry or didactic; it is hilarious and a welcome addition." -- Oz McGuire, critic for REVIEW
Related Websites:
http://home.earthlink.net/~jiricech
http://home.earthlink.net/~umlaut
-- Robin Trafton, art critic, The Kansas City Star
Jiri Cech is managed by Jaded Ibis Productions, Inc., Kansas City, Missouri USA
