This extraordinary work will transform how you see the element in which we live, which surrounds us, and enters us – as agency, as magical entity, as mode of transport to other dimensions; the ‘eternal, axiomatic, cosmic wind.’ Zephyrian Spools is a wind-vision: part poem, part novel, part feminist Bildungsroman, part virtual film-script, part essay, tracing a young filmmaker called Lydia’s obsession with the haunting cinematic dream of filming the wind. Her quest leads her to the enigmatic and sensual scholar-mystic Dr Lizzie Zephyrah with whom she undergoes a species of apprenticeship: ‘we are making a film. It just doesn’t involve a camera.’ This beguiling, unclassifiable text re-humanises our new materialism and fashions a lens for yet further, far-seeing enquiry: ‘realising you are wind filming wind.’
– Scott Thurston
Zephyrian Spools mixes autobiography, psychogeography, film history, phenomenology and mysticism in a tumultuous essay on the wind and cinema. Neis’ queer gaze on witchcraft, healing and rabbinical knowledge pits Spinoza against Descartes in a lesbian love story full of quirky scholarship, anecdotal riffs, science and folklore. Towards the end of this eclectic essay/poem/study it segues into kabbalah and concrete poetry, a text as wild as the wind.
– Ruth Novaczek
Zephyrian Spools is a wholly original book, a metaphysical mystery that touches on the way our private passions become both our albatrosses and our north stars. Just as the wind can change from a summer breeze to a hurricane, Zephyrian Spools changes form as it moves through its story’s different terrains. Both the subject and form speak to what it means to be a spiritual being. Together they invite us to reflect on the ways our own personal passions demand expression, and suggest how the pursuit of that which singularly stirs us might move us toward fulfillment of some larger purpose, guided as we are by that which we can only sometimes sense and feel, but never directly know, or see.
– MICHAEL QUINN
This hybrid essay moves as the wind does, uncovering, unsettling and displacing, nudging and lifting our thoughts. When the piece reaches its climax, we find ourselves in a subtly altered landscape, breathless, alive, without our old bearings.
– Helen Mort