news | Monday March 3, 2014

Essay: Arc Poetry Magazine on The Place of Scraps

Arc Poetry magazine recently published an essay by Margaret Christakos on Jordan Abel’s remarkable book of poetry, The Place of Scraps (Talon, 2013). Brief extracts give a sense of this essay’s wisdom and depth:

I have tried to re/view this book with the attention it deserves, and tried to resist the critical efficiency protocol that requires me to sum up a complex work with one or two authoritative sentences that claim to identify first what the book is and what it does. Jordan Abel has moved a poetics of erasure into an inventive and deeply unsettling, stir-it-up interdisciplinary modality. … this is a book that can assist in an organic decompositional journey of cognitive dissonance and resonance, to shred and shed language toward sound and song, which could be considered the primary questions poetry has to offer.

The full essay is available online: “Weight, Rise and Riffle: Jordan Abel’s Exuberant Excisions in _The Place of Scraps_”.