So What So That

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