Translation: the bass accompaniment--Selected Poems

Poetry. The bass guitar creates patterns that make music into a visceral experience—they are what infect the body. The poems in TRANSLATION: THE BASS ACCOMPANIMENT—SELECTED POEMS are in dialog with other authors, and here, experimental poetry engages logician Quine, encyclopedic novelist Melville, philosophers Irigaray and Deleuze, theologian and synthetic philosopher Aquinas, poets Dragomoshchenko, Hejinian, Raworth, Baudelaire, and Celan, Soviet cinematographer Vertov, video artist Bill Viola, and others.

Many have written of the mediated experience that language, private life, and civic life involve. In that spirit, the poetry engages the syntax of exploratory thought from ten earlier books brought together here for the first time and ends with a poem that hints at a version of tomorrow.