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“...some ekphrastic evening, this’ll be both criticism and poetry and failing that fall somewhere that seems like in between.”
So writes poet, critic, theorist, and MacArthur fellow Fred Moten in his latest poetry collection perennial fashion presence falling. Much like the poems found in The Feel Trio (Letter Machine, 2014), which was a National Book Award finalist, and All That Beauty (Letter Machine, 2019), the poems here present Moten’s “shaped prose” on the page and the dizzying brilliance of both polyphonies and paronomasia. Within this collection, the poems hold an innate quantum curiosity about the infinitude of the present and the ways in which one could observe the history of the future. Poems beget poems, overflowing and flowering, urging deeper etymological investigations. In perennial fashion presence falling, Moten approaches the sublime, relishing that intermediary space of microtonal thought.
–Michael Thurston, Massachusetts Review
Moten helps us feel the difference between real beauty of spirit and its impersonations, by uniting style, rigor, and form so seamlessly that the lesser musics will simply be forgotten.
–Harmony Holiday, BOMB
[Moten’s] newest collection develops a poetics of indeterminacy, using visual art and music as focal points upon which to hone its faculty of critique. And, being an unyieldingly interdisciplinary text, it does so in the context of scientific, philosophical, and critical discourses that turn upon the thought of the intensive: that which resists being counted, weighed, or otherwise quantified. In perennial fashion presence falling, Moten’s fields and rivers don’t stretch, his landscapes don’t unfold, so much as they sublimate, transfiguring representation into abstraction.
–Coleman Edward Dues, Cleveland Review of Books
Moten’s poetics say only in “disintegration,” or as this collection might call it “surfacing,” of what is known as “culture,” only in the falling / breaking apart, only in the “reach beyond grasping,” can “we get to / go through / someplace else,” which is the very place art needs to aspire if we are ever going to move from a culture built upon brutality.
–Dan Hodgson, Action, Spectacle
Fred Moten teaches courses and conducts research in black studies, performance studies, poetics and critical theory at New York University. He is the author of Arkansas (Pressed Wafer, 2000), In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003), I ran from it but was still in it. (Cusp Books, 2007), Hughson's Tavern(Leon Works, 2008), B Jenkins (Duke University Press, 2009), The Feel Trio (Letter Machine Editions, 2014), which was a National Book Award finalist. He also is the co-author with Stefano Harney of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013).
the red sheaves
covering
corduroy, no strings attached
the interfacial layer is violence, not care
the intrafacial lair
afro-alienation lining out
tables and gems
the faerie ornithologie
sylphtet (a triologue of self and soul
are you one of these motherfuckers?
color field
tiling, lining notes
tilling, limning notes
surfacing
the abolition of art, the abolition of freedom, the abolition of you and me
approaching
asé
cowrecked and led to trespass
fingerprinting
taj subjduction
subductive lauren
with the band2
why you leave ‘em with me?
got ‘im!
merda nostra
knotting
epistrophe and epistrophy
or discovering
graves say, grave says