So What So That

Thinking through jazz as a form of modernism, this is poetry in kinetic, musical, spatial relationship to the page. Praise for Marjorie Welish: "[Welish] challenges 'prettiness' at an almost feverish pitch, working against a poem's anticipated flow even as she moves it along with jazzy verve." --Bookforum Welish uses the page--not as a surface upon which to buoy language, but as a core construction of the poem, in visual and kinetic relationship with text. One of our most challenging and rewarding poets, the pleasure is to simply marvel. From "Vamp ('avant pied')": In laughter you acquit the betwixt divided by half and half helped into the indecent parentheses brooding on reasoning, resonance--too much reverb lay in the epilogue