Striven, the Bright Treatise

Poetry. "Against Suicide" is the title of one sequence in STRIVEN, THE BRIGHT TREATISE but could just as easily stand for the whole. A lyric manifesto, by turns probing and furious, STRIVEN, THE BRIGHT TREATISE enlarges upon the poet's brother's death in 2007. "Can you psalm / this limit-work," Pethybridge asks, echoing Zukofsky; the limit of such work-in-language, such unpronounceable grief, is, ultimately, a Nessus-garment of a text, "a shirt of beautiful / noise." In his cunningly evolving repetitions, in his provocative use of constraints, and in his adaptations of great works (from Dante's to David Bowie's), Pethybridge's STRIVEN, THE BRIGHT TREATISE exemplifies every element of Theodor Adorno's assertion that the unresolved antagonisms of reality reappear in art in the guise of immanent problems of artistic form.