Completing a trilogy that includes The Locality Principle
and The Silhouette of the Bridge, Waldrop—professor at Brown University, co-editor of the Burning Deck press and leading light of experimental poetry—deals in premature death, aged death, biblical death ("in the Old Testament: no word for body"), "good death," the shifting subjectivity of death ("I live until I die. I die. Then he is dead."), displacement, lost people and lost belongings. Cumulatively, these absences afford preponderant evidence of life, which, in this book-length series, quietly and purposefully makes for a positive proof: "I look at them and/ wonder what it was I was trying to photograph.// I piss into the bowl. The sound reassures me.// ...The world begins in the evening. The year begins in/ winter." (July)
