Fugue State

<p class=ql-align-justify><em>Fugue State</em> is John Wilkinson's fifteenth book of poems and the most fiery. In it the world is thicker than ever crowded with all sorts of things from futures to the exhumed bodies of 80 girls. His muse is a fly try to catch it. His sentences zigzag. His unique fashion of figuration risks cutting ties with verisimilitude. Opposing everything that blocks hardens locks and pursues a single choke-hold course he takes his stand on the edge of chaos not instituted law. Thus would he champion the precept of refreshment not least the natural cycle of living things. More he curses the misbegetting Gods [who] fuck in beach-huts of a cement Lethe. Data-streams a horizon of ones and zeros self-driving cars drones crypto-currency robots - these are for him aspects of the concretization of modern culture. Fighting its sway he is as steely as he is mercurial. Force is good if it's on the side of the vital artery. In the last decade Wilkinson has become a master of the longish poem - here for instance 'East Lake' and 'Xipe Totec.' Of poets now writing in English he is the freest and most elusive-on-principle the most capable of pulling out a language blade and using it. </p><p class=ql-align-justify>-Calvin Bedient</p><p class=ql-align-center><br></p><p class=ql-align-center><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify>Contrapuntal polyphonic recursive and baroque John Wilkinson's <em>Fugue State</em> sounds the dissociative disorder of our time - and of history itself. May my transmission glorify each wandering singular flight writes this poet; from the business traveller's fugue in a transport café to a fossilized insect on a rock discovered in its rock face itself rock Wilkinson charts fugitive flight paths through arrest and duration myth and modernity art and violence interiority and collective life. <em>Fugue State</em> exposes us like the flayed singer Marsyas to our own wild skin unfolding. From this vital material we might fashion a flag for lifeworlds to come. </p><p class=ql-align-justify>-Srikanth Reddy</p><p><br></p>