Will Alexander (born 1948 in Los Angeles) is an African-American artist, philosopher, poet, novelist, essayist and pianist. An archetypal outsider, he released his first poetry collection aged 44 while working at the Los Angeles Lakers’ ticket office. Three decades on, he has ascended to the legendary status of the city’s great living surrealist.

America 2024

Operating at the edge of language, Alexander deploys words in a way that feels prophetic: human psyches synthesize with technological artifacts; atoms and archetypes collide; bodies are vacated, voices are newly incarnated. In doing so, Alexander draws from a vast array of influences, from luminaries like Aimé Césaire, Bob Kaufman, Andre Breton, Antonin Artaud, and Philip Lamantia, to holistic visions such as Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga, the Mayan numerical system, and Cheikh Anta Diop’s perspectives on ancient Egypt.
He belongs to an America circa 2024, where poetry – the art of developing new means of speaking – has never been of such artistic, technological, and political consequence.

In a preview of Charismatic Spirals in the New York Times, Anne Boyer captured the essence of his work: “visionary poetry [that] achieves its effect through sound, not image…Cadence [that] can shatter us, set the world ablaze.”

Softcover, published in 2023, 7×11 cm, 204 pages.

ISOLARII’s tiny books

Founded in 2020, ISOLARII revives an extinct literary genre—the Renaissance “island book,” or isolario—to map the world’s most defiant and unruly intellects. ISOLARII are tiny, the size of a pack of cigarettes, but potent, maintaining the ethos that the most expansive ideas can be held in the hand. Authored by figures who interrogate the shape of the avant-garde, what it is, and what it could become, these volumes offer readers fully formed, high voltage ideas that can be finished during a commute yet felt for weeks. Editor of this series is Sebastian Clark.