The Little Edges (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

New
Paperback
2016
$14.98

The Little Edges is a collection of poems that extends poet Fred Moten's experiments in what he calls shaped prose -a way of arranging prose in rhythmic blocks, or sometimes shards, in the interest of audio-visual patterning. Shaped prose is a form that works the little edges of lyric and discourse, and radiates out into the space between them. As occasional pieces, many of the poems in the book are the result of a request or commission to comment upon a work of art, or to memorialize a particular moment or person. In Moten's poems, the matter and energy of a singular event or person are transformed by their entrance into the social space that they, in turn, transform. An online reader's companion is available at http://fredmoten.site.wesleyan.edu.

Synopsis

The Little Edges is a collection of poems that extends poet Fred Moten's experiments in what he calls shaped prose -a way of arranging prose in rhythmic blocks, or sometimes shards, in the interest of audio-visual patterning. Shaped prose is a form that works the little edges of lyric and discourse, and radiates out into the space between them. As occasional pieces, many of the poems in the book are the result of a request or commission to comment upon a work of art, or to memorialize a particular moment or person. In Moten's poems, the matter and energy of a singular event or person are transformed by their entrance into the social space that they, in turn, transform. An online reader's companion is available at http://fredmoten.site.wesleyan.edu.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 96
Edition: Reprint
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Published: 04 Aug 2016
ISBN 10: 0819576700
ISBN 13: 9780819576705

Media Reviews

In many ways, Fred Moten's work is devoted to fugitivity. The stance of his poems is grassroots revolutionary: undoing by means of the everyday, the super-powerful default settings of a corporatized world and thereby reopening the case for what the world of poetry might look and feel like. --Elizabeth Willis Boston Review (7/1/2015 12:00:00 AM)
Moten's work is free speech in the best sense--musical but with heft--and will appeal to those who prefer their poetry to be 'beyond category'. --Chris Pusateri Library Journal (2/1/2015 12:00:00 AM)
In [Moten's poetry], he gathers the sources running through his head and transforms them into something musical, driven by the material of language itself. The poem 'all topological last friday evening, ' collected in Moten's 2015 book, The Little Edges, ... unfolds as a chain of references, from free-jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler to Andrew Marvell. We may not know exactly how we moved from one to the other, but there's pleasure in getting lost in the dance. --David Wallace The New Yorker (4/30/2018 12:00:00 AM)
Sometimes Moten is riding a wave of sound ... It's like you're walking by a practice room and someone is improvising on the saxophone, lost to the music, and it's so clear and haunting and beautiful, you can't not stop and listen. --Joy Katz American Poetry Review (5/1/2015 12:00:00 AM)

Author Bio

FRED MOTEN is a professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of Arkansas, Poems (with Jim Behrle), I ran from it but was still in it, Hughson s Tavern, B Jenkins, The Feel Trio, and the critical works In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition and The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (with Stefano Harney).