Almost Thence Sum

Jeffrey Herrick's poetry, in an essentially celebratory mode, performs a disruption of language as we know it, a veritable violence that only the rarest poets authorize themselves to allow. It's an unprecedented genre created in the spirited interest of language self-reinvention. How we read poetry undergoes here the kind of transformation that awakens its inherent potential-- the possibility for embodying what Charles Olson called our further nature. And it's work with a concrete, visual dimension that occupies the space between many languages-- a work in diversity by a polyglot American poet who has lived for decades abroad from the Middle East to Japan. The author of several previous books, this is Herrick's first to appear in this country.