The Little Edges

December 15, 2014
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 Muñoz, 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.”

November 1, 2014

Moten experiments in "shaped prose," arranging words in rhythmic blocks, shards, and in audio-visual patterns.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.