The seductive voice of the poet, Spiel, leads us on this mesmerizing journey into deep secrets many of us may share but may find too personal or too dark to reveal.

11 MP3 Songs
SPOKEN WORD: Poetry, SPOKEN WORD: With Music

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Details:
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Review of C.D., "breathing back words"

"Whatever you are expecting when you pick up this CD--forget it. This is not a poet reading his material in a dry and bored voice into a microphone while he sips tea and strokes his cat. This is an aural tour-de-force that will entertain you, amaze you, and disturb you. Take an hour and sit down with your CD player and listen to what can be done with recorded poetry. This might very well revolutionize the way poetry is laid down in recorded form. Cheers to Spiel for once again showing us the way."
Robert Bixby, March Street Press
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About the poet, Spiel:

"...(Spiel) challenges the current tendency of small press poets to do little else but reaffirm the pedestrian nature of life. Spiel refuses to produce small, tasty commodities that gloss, harmonize, and freeze frame. Rather than impose epiphany onto image, Spiel moves from image to social analysis. Therefore, 'Spiel Speak' is an audacious language of struggle, a language of talkback which invades, ignites, and possibly even transforms the reader."

Excerpt from a review of Spiel's chapbook, "come here
cowboy: poems of war" by Don Winter
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Excerpt from a Spiel interview with Charles P. Ries:
"Spiel writes with great range and passion. So much so that it is easy to hear and remember only his loudest shouts - those poems in which he pounds the door and cries out for the injustice, the inequality and sorrow of this life. But flip these poems over and you find a poet equally equipped to write soft, spare, musical poems filled with sentiment and yearning."

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Review of "breathing back words," the C.D.
"Georges Bataille wrote "poetry leads to the same place as all forms of eroticismâto the blending and fusion of separate objects." Such a vision of poetry, both sexual and mystic, both sacred and deeply perverse, runs throughout the poetry and music of breathing back words. Beginning with The Poet Spiel's voice giving a sultry, unaccompanied reading of his erotic love poem "chair," the album quickly moves into desperate and disturbing material, exploring every sort of sickness of society and intimacy as it forces us into an even-handed yet excruciating study of race, gender, lust, cruelty, and crime. At no point after the opening track can we feel comfortable with our narrators, but they demand empathy and understanding. Jack Moss's music, using a vast and varied methodology, echoes these themes of fusion and confusion, and we are left, after many deserved listens, with no specific answers and no real conclusions, but a deeper understanding of the blending of passion and psychopathy. Ultimately, breathing back words shows us new ways to understand the toxic mixture of hatred and lust, desire and compassion, Eros and Thanatos that defines the human condition. This is a complete and moving philosophical and artistic statement of both despair and freedom from despair."
Jonathan Penton, âUnlikely Stories"