Because the World Is Spinning by Marcus Elman
(Released by MacQ on 1 September 2024)

Cover art: Danse d’automne (Autumn Dance), ink drawing (2023)
by Michel Costiou. Copyrighted © ADAGP 2024
by the artist. All rights reserved.

Belong to Light

Everywhere, and all at once 
stars splashing light, cool 
in their blues, ever-flowing jewels. 
This wave as wide as 
the universe, as deep as magma, 
finds me here with you. 

Stop a second, hold on, hold me. 
Life lives us, belongs to us, your 
heartbeat next to mine sings 
of longing, ripples along the heat 
of a midnight tambour. 

Won’t you kiss me now? 

Be the ray~
Be the wave~
Ultra and violet~

Show me again, oh show me 
again, how the light is 
everywhere and all at once. 

—From the poet’s chapbook, Because the World Is Spinning (MacQ, September 2024)

Snowy Egrets on Santa Monica Bay

Canary-yellow slippers, forever legs, the same gold mascara meeting a brilliant black bill. How they dance on gleaming shores tempting tiny prey with tinsel toes. Their mark peeks, our egret darts, precise bottlenose beak spears curious beasts. I find myself imitating that three-step thrust, that darting dagger of a beak. Down the beach I egret dance until I feel a bit birdy, a bit purdy; egret gracely. Between the sea wrack at low tide, ten egrets, plume, sleek yet downy, cut a dashing chorus. Inside my neural ensemble, I hear oboes, cellos, a berimbau and shakuhachi. I waltz along these snowy egrets, and when one flashes me its mustard slipper, I just say hot dog!

—From the poet’s chapbook, Because the World Is Spinning (MacQ, September 2024)

Praise for Marcus Elman’s Poetry

One might expect a dancer/yoga instructor who has traveled the world in order to understand other cultures and points of view, to be interested in what gives our lives meaning and how to confront the pain and terrors that we encounter—and Marcus Elman does not disappoint. His debut chapbook, Because the World Is Spinning, explores ways that the world tries to crush people, and sometimes succeeds. But this collection is ultimately uplifting as it also demonstrates how people find courage and strength, and Elman celebrates those qualities that give people an extra measure of dignity.

—John Brantingham, author of 21 books of poetry, memoir, and fiction, and founding editor of The Journal of Radical Wonder

“Everything / has a shadow side—even the soul might have / a dark night,” the poet says in “Night From Day” [page 12]. Marcus Elman turns a spotlight on the human condition in all its messy glory. These poems are gems, faceted, brilliant. They catch the light, and dance.

—Alexis Rhone Fancher, author of Triggered and Brazen

Totally relatable and universally beautiful.

—Nancy Wilson, guitarist, singer, and songwriter

Marcus Elman

is a yoga and fitness therapist working mostly with the elder/sage population in Southern California. Also a dancer and poet, he is curious about energy, how things work and get repaired, and the idea of redemption.

As a young dancer in the late 1980s, he collaborated four years with French artist Michel Costiou in the artist’s studio in Paris, on experimental movement. In their common search to activate and awaken energy, they redefined and shaped the art studio as a laboratory of experimental movement and painting. Three of Costiou’s artworks appear in Elman’s debut poetry chapbook, Because the World Is Spinning (MacQ, 1 September 2024). [For more about the artist, see his bio below.]

Elman’s poem “The Boulevards of Los Angeles” received an honorable mention in Beyond Baroque’s 2017 annual poetry prize and was published in the textbook Method & Mystery: A Research-Based Guide to Teaching Poetry (The Poetry Salon, 2019). “The Crossing” was shortlisted for the Into The Void Poetry Prize 2020. His poems have been published in Cultural Daily [see links below], in MacQueen’s Quinterly, and in three volumes of Sunbeams: The Joan Ramseyer Memorial Poetry Anthology (2018, 2019, and 2020). He is a graduate of American River College, UC Davis, and Pepperdine.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Marcus Elman: Two Poems in Cultural Daily (5 January 2023): “The Prosciutto Ambulance” and “The Offering”

⚡ The Boulevards of Los Angeles in Cultural Daily (26 September 2018)

Michel Costiou

Visual artist and educator Michel Costiou lives and works in Paris, France. At the age of 13, he began taking lessons in drawing and painting at the school of art in Tarbes. From 1963-70, he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Toulouse; and later at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris (now known as the Beaux-Arts de Paris). He is also trained in the Bauhaus Movement.

From 1974-81, Costiou was principal professor of art drawing and letter drawing for the Competitions of the Higher Schools of Arts. From 1977-2014, he was professor of plastic arts for the French communes (analogous to civil townships in the US) of Garches, Rueil Malmaison, Maurepas, and Magny-les-Hameaux.

Costiou created the first workshop in movement drawing with musicians, dancers, acrobats, and mimes at the Académie d’Art Roederer, Place des Vosges in Paris, which has since been practiced in all the Schools of Arts.

Considered the founder of “Art in Movement,” Michel Costiou focuses primarily on four themes in his work: dance, circus arts, the Republican Guard (French cavalry), and the music hall.

Source: Inspiration: Ink: “The Art of Movement” at Lefranc Bourgeois art-supply house, for which Costiou is an informal ambassador.

To view Costiou’s artworks online, visit: Galerie 21.