Peeping Mot

by Andrew Maxwell

A collection of epigrams, captions, asides and short takes dedicated to codebreaker Leo Marx, containing a loose taxonomy organizing the whole.

"Like the cast of characters A Maxwell has here assembled (Robert Walser, Aaron Kunin, Rene Char, Sir Thomas Browne, and more), PEEPING MOT is a collection of brilliant and occult profundity. Its propositions admirably reinvent the paternal, make a wry and deep inquiry into the function of poetry, and wield the epigram as Chinese box, as koan. It is a book of uncommonly beautiful language and enigmatic intelligence, packed with soft surprises."
–– Maggie Nelson

92 pages, Paperback

First published June 15, 2013

About the author

Andrew Maxwell is the author of PEEPING MOT (Apogee Press, 2013), CANDOR IS THE BRIGHTEST SHIELD (UDP, 2015), and CONVERSION TABLE (Mindmade, 2017). He is interested in meta-literature and compressed forms. For the last two decades, he has worked in the fields of taxonomy, audience and identity as manager of classification and machine learning initiatives at Applied Semantics, Google and Snapchat in Los Angeles, where he is also a radio DJ and co-directs the Poetic Research Bureau, a valise fiction and project space in the arts district of Chinatown. From 1997-2005, he published a journal of poetry and translation, THE GERM, with MacGregor Card. Maxwell has released several small collections of poems, lists and epigrammatic writing on the PRB imprint—portable, artisanal items meant to pass hand to hand in limited quantity. He typically underwrites his small collections with the simple initial A, as impediment to indexability, and in tribute to other minor/maker poets like David Schubert and Wallace Berman.

Reviews

[Zack]

i really dug andrew maxwell's book. let me know if you want to borrow it. it's a bunch of aphorisms with "keys" as little footnotes to help frame your thinking around them.