About Lazarus, a Remix:

A note on process:

The poems in this collection are remixes/hybrids/découpé of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel-era poems. Not to worry, these are all original, transformed works – I have not violated any laws regarding copyrighted material – I checked with a lawyer. Plath’s poems still exist – I’ve done nothing to harm them. These are also my fanboy love letters to Plath.

This is a post-post-post-modern book; it is one big metaphor. I reconstructed the poems for Lazarus, a Remix using the 1960s remix process that William S. Burroughs used in creating such works as The Ticket That Exploded and Nova Express, among other novels. My process, however, includes additional poetical steps: editing for meaning/subject matter/clarity, an injection of poetic metrical count (making it, at times, closer to blank verse, or French syllabic verse), and/or insertion of various rhyme formulae.

Those familiar with the text of Plath’s Ariel will notice that I completed my poem series by remixing and including additional poems Plath wrote during her last year that were not originally collected in Ariel. I took poetic license with the poem titles, as well.

When read aloud, these poems reveal their true music.

From the author:

This collection is an LGBTQ+ time capsule from the 1990s, a barometer of a time period when our community was still unable to marry, still considered a mental illness by some, and we were second-class citizens living in a world that did everything it could to stop us becoming who we were.

Also, HIV rears its ugly head in many of the poems. To have lived and come of age in the LGBTQ+ community during a pandemic like AIDS was terrible. Your own blood could betray you. Sex = Death. There was no cure. Imagine your heroes and mentors disappearing. You have no one to learn from, no one to imitate, no one who could initiate you.

It was genocide in slow motion.

On a personal note, many of the poems in Lazarus, a Remix are about Recovery. They come directly from my experience with my battle against alcoholism and heroin addiction. I wrote them all while incarcerated in several drug and alcohol rehabs in Northern California. They are a document and a fever chart, my breadcrumb trail leading out of the addiction and incomprehensible demoralization and into the beginnings of sobriety.

Andrew Demčák, 2026