A Complex Sentence
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Coffee House Press
Published:24th Jun '21
Should be back in stock very soon
In A Complex Sentence, Marjorie Welish builds immersive intertextual environments as she questions the canon of modernist poetry and the ways we talk about poetics.
In her sixth collection with Coffee House, Welish continues to explore rhetorical practices such as diagramming, inscription, and quotation, to call our attention to literary acts—from finding the right desk to getting lost at logic gates—yet all the while following the mental circuitry of dismantling and re-assembling a poetic language. Expertly manipulating the space of the page, her poems dissolve the boundaries between visual art and the written word. With her signature precision, musicality, and structural rigor, Welish turns the lyric poem into a critical instrument with which to think about the writer’s calling, through the specifics of language and literature.
Praise for A Complex Sentence
“There is a clarity in the book’s musicality and a disruption of clarity in its sensitive juxtapositions. This is Welish at her best and most powerful moments, at moments of loss and gain, at moments of assuredness and in fleets of frailty.” —Allen Fisher
“Welish’s sentences are complex, grammatically and narratively; they break the spine, as it were, of the book’s monumentality. In the interstices of writing and saying lies the supplement to meaning, what we read between the lines or what the lines—center margined or flush left—arrange as a new structure of understanding. This is a wild and compelling book.” —Michael Davidson
“Displacing semantics with syntactics, foregrounding the syntagmatic over the paradigmatic, Welish reminds her readers of the structural, formal, and, above all, cultural values that constrain all meaning-making, artistic or not. For these reasons and more, the title of this book must be read simultaneously as a dialectics—adjective-noun, adjective-verb, noun-verb—without resolution, three dyads orbiting one another in the dance of an intellect with few peers.” —Tyrone Williams
ISBN: 9781566896085
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
128 pages