Solipsis Eclipse Is Out April 28th
Dustin Cormier's debut poetry collection Solipsis Eclipse — six years of free verse paired with illustrations by Benjamin Nagy — arrives April 28th, 2026.
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Original Front Cover of Solipsis Eclipse
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In high school I became obsessively fascinated with late 1960s counterculture. I loved the music, the writing, and the ethos that sprang from it. The vibrations that ebbed from that period felt distinctly alive to me in ways that my immediate surroundings couldn’t match. After graduation I spent a lot of time reading about that period, witnessing its connections to ancient sublime roots of spiritual mysticism, while also writing, practicing yoga and meditation, and smoking weed - an activity I did a lot in those days.
My love of reading was eclectic and tended toward the old and esoteric. Such works as mystical Chinese poetry, the soulful Bhagavad Gita, the mysterious Tao Te Ching, and others were common on my docket. But I was equally drawn to writers from the last two centuries as well — Walt Whitman, Emerson and Thoreau, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, Jack Kerouac, and Charles Bukowski. There was a thread running throughout these works: generally speaking, they were all writers and thinkers who drew from wellsprings of inspiration common to all mankind, who treated consciousness and material as equally divine in their own way, and who were devoutly interested in nature in its many variations and forms.
My own writing style stewed and bubbled out of that cauldron — I took on the style of free verse in the tradition of Ginsberg and Whitman, mainly because I admired the bardic play they shared between imagery and alliteration as the focal point in their lines. The works of my favorite writers reads like a translated verse from an ancient language since there is no rhyme scheme, no halting limerick to cringe and gripe for, only pure imagery and syllable-flow, the good stuff.
I always shared a warm social circle with my siblings and immediate family growing up, but my deepest connections were kept to a small, intimate circle of close friends who shared a lot of the same artistic and countercultural instincts I had. Two of those friends were Benjamin Nagy and Jack Dempster. We all met around the time we were in high school and subsequently after - Ben and Jack met while working at a pizza shop, while Jack and I met in high school and hung out later on in various cafes. Ben was later introduced to me through Jack. As it turned out, we'd all been reading largely the same books — Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Alan Watts, the whole Zen current that ran through the 60s, as well as Bukowski and others. The three of us hung out regularly sharing music, literature, stories, and whatever we were working on or obsessing over. We would often recite poetry to each other, and we even had a friendly haiku competition or two somewhere back in the 2010s. Jack and I both mainly trafficked in words and music. Ben's world included that too, but he was also adept in the visual arts — his notebooks were full of colored illustrations he had been quietly building up over the years, meticulous drawings that hadn't been seen outside of his own sketchbooks.
At some point, Ben and I got together with the idea of doing something creative with our individual bodies of work. I brought a pile of poems, and Ben brought his notebooks - and Jack decided to come along for the ride, too. That afternoon we smoked a joint together and then laid out all of our materials on my living room floor — poems on one side, illustrations on the other. We started intuitively pairing pieces from each pile that seemed to belong together. We didn’t have a system for bringing things together, we just felt things based on what made sense. Darker material drifted toward darker images while dreamier, more cerebral poems found their way toward the drawings that held a similar atmosphere.
That afternoon became Solipsis Eclipse. Every poem you see in the book was meticulously picked out to match the drawing adjacent to it. It was a very interesting, creative, and productive merging of artistic synergy. Poetry is already trying to make you see something through imagery and literary synapses — but placing these poems alongside illustrations with no explanation of the connection, matching them purely on vibe and aesthetic, created something we hadn't anticipated. We scratched into an interesting borderland between the mind’s eye and the physical cornea.
Solipsis Eclipse is what happens when a person is so overwhelmingly affected by an experience that their dream bubble is pierced, and they are forced to come to grips with a reality that lies outside of their preconceptions and expectations. The bookrepresents my first published collection — a mishmash of erotic, psychedelic, and mystical verse written over about six years, paired throughout with Ben's colored illustrations and introduced by Jack. The poems move through surreal imagery, altered states, the body, the metaphysical soul, and the strange overlap between all of those things. It turned into a tight little 74 page chapbook that we are all equally proud of. It runs pretty short at that number of pages, but it represents a good kickpad for later works by all of us.
I've been writing in other directions since — astrology, spirituality, psychedelics — and I plan on producing those writings into books soon. But before that campaign begins, I have decided to bring this material forward first to readers who have not been introduced to it. It is the true starting point in my author’s journey.
Solipsis Eclipse, with illustrations by Benjamin Nagy and an introduction by Jack Dempster, is available April 28th, 2026.
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