At Yale Review, Stephanie Burt Reviews Four Books That Take Their Space

In the new Yale Review, Stephanie Burt looks at the book-length poem, and four of those published in 2019 that she can count as favorite poetry books: Fred Moten’s All That Beauty, Emmalea Russo’s Wave Archive, Rosalie Moffet’s Nervous System, and Hannah Sullivan’s Three Poems. "None feels like a methodically rigorous Project," writes Burt. More:

…And none feels like a collection of stand-alone poems, either. Rather, they use length as an aesthetic device: their continuity, their ongoingness, shows how the people, things, feelings they depict remain intertwined, open-ended, hard to resolve. Because they can take the time to show you how to read them, they depend less than brief lyric poems do on conventions you’re likely to understand coming in. They have room to digress: they have space to double back, and even to string you along. Taken together, these books show how disparate strategies for writing a long poem—or creating collections made of long poems—can preserve a sense of surprise in the middle, yet hold a book together, beginning to end.

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How would it feel to enter the world not as someone who wants to control and to understand it, but as someone who sets out to improvise, to collaborate, to play? How would we know when a poem could end? As with most of Fred Moten’s earlier volumes, All That Beauty comprises sequences, in a roller-coaster of prose and occasionally verse, incorporating quotations, riffs, echoes, and bits of literary and cultural theory in (to use Moten’s own terms) a Black Radical tradition. Moten usually jettisons such familiar standards of prose (and of pre-modernist verse) as consecutive argument, concrete reference, and consistency of voice. Instead, he has style, distinctive sounds, and a way of being—Moten might say a “resistance”—that goes along with them...

Read on at Yale Review.