Disintegration and Other Poems

<p class=ql-align-justify>Jeff Fort's <em>Disintegration</em> is like a mysterious peacock's plumage: from the start you are swimming in strange beauty as you slowly recognize that it has many eyes. The book has one eye on the experimental traditions of modernist invention one on the catastrophe of the present another eye on dreams another still with a precise eye on language. But finally it has all eyes on something else: 'what matters is pure utopia' as it reminds us against forgetting against blindness.</p><p class=ql-align-justify>-Joshua Clover author of <em>The Totality for Kids</em> (UC Press) and <em>Red Epic</em> (Commune Editions)</p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify><em>Disintegration</em> is a 'thinking thing' a 'thinking kind of thread.' A 'murmur' it says of itself or a buzz or a rattle. I would say it's a song mostly muffled with an on-and-off beat at the tail end of human life on earth. It's 'the call of all that's left.' You can see as well as hear it in letters that come apart change places drop out and misspell the words that try even now to gather up the whole business remember and return someplace. Home? They ring with a hollow ring that is a ring nonetheless-a strange unfamiliar sound for all its obsolescence. The 'call of all that's left' is something unexpected; it is new. </p><p class=ql-align-justify>-Ann Smock author of <em>The Play of Light: Jacques Roubaud Emmanuel Hocquard and Friends</em> (SUNY Press)</p><p><br></p>