The Little Edges
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Guggenheim Fellowship (2016)
The Little Edges is a collection of poems that extends poet Fred Moten’s experiments in what he calls “shaped prose”—a way of arranging prose in rhythmic blocks, or sometimes shards, in the interest of audio-visual patterning. Shaped prose is a form that works the “little edges” of lyric and discourse, and radiates out into the space between them. As occasional pieces, many of the poems in the book are the result of a request or commission to comment upon a work of art, or to memorialize a particular moment or person. In Moten’s poems, the matter and energy of a singular event or person are transformed by their entrance into the social space that they, in turn, transform. An online reader’s companion is available at http://fredmoten.site.wesleyan.edu.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The latest from the prolific poet, scholar, and 2014 National Book Award finalist (for The Feel Trio) follows serious arguments about the confusing, or revolutionary, power of words and the power of sound. But it's also a lot of fun: Moten pays homage to jazz history, poetry history, and the illimitable future of the imagination in works organized less as autonomous poems than in page-length lines, blocks of text, and short riffs. One follows "the history of the soloist who is not one, of one in nothingness in cherry and/ choir, of things in blossom in aperture, a stray horn through a crack in the wall." Moten drops a lot of names, from the jazz singer Nancy Wilson to the late queer theorist Jose Mu oz, but he never drops the threads that connect his performances of protest, small-group improvisation, and remade history. Though hard to decode with confidence and concatenated from so many ranges of reference, Moten and his supersaturated syntax nonetheless invites us to join in their exuberance, remaking their own sounds, running the changes on their mixed-in quotes: "the southern question of travel," like his own writing, "makes a joyful noise and moves slowly in awareness. Now// we can speculate on the relay of our common activity, make a circle round our errant roots."
