American Literature (Dalkey Archive)
2 total works
A gift for his wife, Jay Wright’s Polynomials and Pollen explores the complementary exigencies of abstraction and physicality. In five sections, each arranged under the aegis of a tutelary concept—from the Yoruba, Akan, Bamana, and Náhuatl—the book is a constellation of protophilosophical inquiry into notions of order, disarray, evidence, flowering, and return; it is also a dynamically visceral work whose feelingtones register rage as well as devotion.
The Presentable Art of Reading Absence takes as impulse the act of meditation, in which the energetic relationship between a meditative body and its universe is not only the envisioning of absence by presence but also vision itself: “Here begins the revelation of a kiosk.” With occult emotionality and analytic brilliance, Jay Wright has written the user’s guide to evanescence: “I have become attuned / to the disappearance of all things / and of my self . . .”