Patrick Pritchett, Song X: New and Selected Poems
“I hear the motion in these stirring poems as radiant spans of thought, ‘the AutoGraphic gesture of becoming.’ A reader will experience the recurrence of a most ancient way of being lost, a world stranger, a visitor here, an X who travels in one long single take. For Pritchett, the word is the sign of a divine spark that must be continually fuelled by more thought. Not cinematic: secret. The poems unveil an orange glow behind loneliness, a color beyond erasure.” —Fanny Howe
“Patrick Pritchett’s Song X takes its title from the classic free jazz album by Pat Methany and Ornette Coleman. And like the music on that album, Pritchett’s poetry seeks to wrest itself from the inherent materiality of its making so that it may achieve an impossibly pure spirit of lyricism. As the poet declares, ‘this is the beauty that smites the city,’ a visionary assault that comes ‘In the asterisk that occludes or names each event.’ Song X contains a generous selection from Pritchett’s earlier collections, including Burn, his daring ‘doxology’ on the martyrdom of Joan of Arc, and Gnostic Frequencies, a work that as clearly reveals the antinomian and acosmic impulses that are shaking up contemporary American poetry as any I might name. To read Pritchett is to walk upon ‘the ground / that undescribes you.’ And that is holy ground.” —Norman Finkelstein
“Patrick Pritchett is an exceptional poet. His revelatory Song X is a gift of life and years and gives up many joys and lived private truth. He is not afraid of beauty and its formal intellect in the estate of song. It’s great to have this essential gathering of his work, it’s a great book.” —Peter Gizzi
"Over the past two decades, poet and essayist Patrick Pritchett has been quietly building an impressive and altogether unique body of work, culminating in a . . . new and selected poems, Song X." --Eric Hoffman, Jacket2
"I may prefer the overarching unity of the serial poem to the context of a selected but without a selected we would not have these thoughtful and thought-provoking texts and the emotional realities that underlie sometimes difficult words. So I turn to the back of the volume and to poems associated with the rubric, Song X, recent examples of Pritchett’s work, poems whose rhythms according to Norman Finkelstein’s note, derive from free jazz. Some poems seem entirely occasional and deeply personal. I especially appreciate the notion that “The beautiful is a kind of noise that we love,” a concept associated with the work of Tim Bahti who has theorized that the lyric rather than pursuing the effects of a satisfying end or resolution instead participates in a loop where the middle is the aesthetic soul, a central idea for Pritchett’s art." --Donald Wellman, Immanent Occasions
Patrick Pritchett is the author of seven books of poetry. He lives in western Massachusetts, where, as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Amherst College, he teaches courses in literature and film.
ISBN 13: 978-1-58498-111-4, paper, $21.95
“I hear the motion in these stirring poems as radiant spans of thought, ‘the AutoGraphic gesture of becoming.’ A reader will experience the recurrence of a most ancient way of being lost, a world stranger, a visitor here, an X who travels in one long single take. For Pritchett, the word is the sign of a divine spark that must be continually fuelled by more thought. Not cinematic: secret. The poems unveil an orange glow behind loneliness, a color beyond erasure.” —Fanny Howe
“Patrick Pritchett’s Song X takes its title from the classic free jazz album by Pat Methany and Ornette Coleman. And like the music on that album, Pritchett’s poetry seeks to wrest itself from the inherent materiality of its making so that it may achieve an impossibly pure spirit of lyricism. As the poet declares, ‘this is the beauty that smites the city,’ a visionary assault that comes ‘In the asterisk that occludes or names each event.’ Song X contains a generous selection from Pritchett’s earlier collections, including Burn, his daring ‘doxology’ on the martyrdom of Joan of Arc, and Gnostic Frequencies, a work that as clearly reveals the antinomian and acosmic impulses that are shaking up contemporary American poetry as any I might name. To read Pritchett is to walk upon ‘the ground / that undescribes you.’ And that is holy ground.” —Norman Finkelstein
“Patrick Pritchett is an exceptional poet. His revelatory Song X is a gift of life and years and gives up many joys and lived private truth. He is not afraid of beauty and its formal intellect in the estate of song. It’s great to have this essential gathering of his work, it’s a great book.” —Peter Gizzi
"Over the past two decades, poet and essayist Patrick Pritchett has been quietly building an impressive and altogether unique body of work, culminating in a . . . new and selected poems, Song X." --Eric Hoffman, Jacket2
"I may prefer the overarching unity of the serial poem to the context of a selected but without a selected we would not have these thoughtful and thought-provoking texts and the emotional realities that underlie sometimes difficult words. So I turn to the back of the volume and to poems associated with the rubric, Song X, recent examples of Pritchett’s work, poems whose rhythms according to Norman Finkelstein’s note, derive from free jazz. Some poems seem entirely occasional and deeply personal. I especially appreciate the notion that “The beautiful is a kind of noise that we love,” a concept associated with the work of Tim Bahti who has theorized that the lyric rather than pursuing the effects of a satisfying end or resolution instead participates in a loop where the middle is the aesthetic soul, a central idea for Pritchett’s art." --Donald Wellman, Immanent Occasions
Patrick Pritchett is the author of seven books of poetry. He lives in western Massachusetts, where, as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Amherst College, he teaches courses in literature and film.
ISBN 13: 978-1-58498-111-4, paper, $21.95