Float

by David Abel

Poetry. "This stunning, wry collection is a tonic, triggering memory and the knowledge that we all enter poems in medias res—from anywhere. Rhythmic fragments or grand paragraphs, FLOAT becomes its own mixing board. At times you hear it almost disappear, then reappear as 'total sound.' In a long poem titled 'Times of Day,' one vertical, vital string, the words 'Zoo / Cage / Jazz' track to John Cage because of interventions earlier in the book, a startling elegy within and without. Cooked or raw, from the title to the end notes, possibilities abound. Alluring, captivating, it's a must-read!"—Norma Cole

Genres: Poetry

144 pages, Paperback

First published May 31, 2012

Reviews

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

A testament to the virtues of the longue durée, Float hauls up poems from the jetsam of our inattentions, returning quoted, found and procedurally generated language to a recursive economy of reading, writing, thinking, and perceiving. The book’s opening section, Conduction, merges twenty-six quotations from twenty-four writers with pithy, daybook-sized reflections that affirm erasure, exegesis and poesis as facets of the same creative act:

“Thinking about writing about having read what I wrote at some long-past moment—and not having access now to what was implied and (crucially) then adjacent—a ‘link,’ the loss of which transforms the actual function of the artifact that remains.”

That function—collecting something like a self from the mind’s adventures in text across time—drives the book’s other sections: Orbus Pictus, inspired by Comenius’s instructional picture-books for children, another genre in which words and world blur, and Times of Day, which funnels the attention, like in a zazen “sitting,” to single words and the slow changes they undergo in clusters. “My medium,” writes Abel, “is: traffic / congestion/ sprawl/ etcetera”—his gift is for registering their instants as “a passing wave, in its limitless demonstrations.”

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hard-edged collage poems. Particular stand-outs include "Time Words", which lists library classifications that involve "time", and "First to Last", which collates the first and last lines of every story in a collection of writers' first short stories.