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Left Having
Poetry. LEFT HAVING is the second full-length collection from poet Jesse Seldess. "One sees lines coming into being going out of existence. Taken that way, the words turning toward lines, seeing them become one another as they differ among themselves and dissipate into words and as spaces, this reader virtually floats and within this active resting state practices an incredible intimacy with the unknown in communication and in sharing an imminent sensate awareness with its language. Jesse Seldess's work performs this book, honoring and taking full advantage of its occasion to replace any knowing with the certainty of a relentlessly generous nature. I will never get to the bottom of it, and this work demonstrates what a pleasure and what an honest reckoning that can be"—Steve Benson.
- GenresPoetry
112 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2011
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
August 1, 2011
In Left Having, Jesse Seldess creates a beautifully solemn, highly attuned reading environment made of words. The words sculpt the white space of the page the way that objects sculpt the physical space of an art installation—I find myself circling back and around these spare lines of verse to pause & consider them from all aspects as if I were in a gallery or museum—and the words also sculpt the quiet of the reader’s silent reading mind with their shifting, evolving sounds.
Propelled by a grounded yet searching voice of incantation and the resonance of recurring vocabulary & phrases such as “left the ending,” “broke signaling,” “further,” “over and over in memory,” “I get the feeling that,” “thought,” “end,” and “happened,” Seldess’s poems are doing something unique & amazing with internal rhyme, if rhyme can even begin to describe the incisive turns in meaning embodied by closely aligned consecutive lines like “One word the other/One heard the other”.
These seemingly subtle shifts gather force & momentum as the poems spiral toward a convergent sense of understanding. Seldess reveals the limitless significance locked within a limited lexicon, the way that sensitive readers of human events & human intelligence continue to uncover insights buried beneath the rubble of history. These poems ring the changes of language, and I want to call this ringing an ethics. This book revolves around the notion of endings and does itself eventually end, but the haunting value of its feelingthinking-space lives on.
Propelled by a grounded yet searching voice of incantation and the resonance of recurring vocabulary & phrases such as “left the ending,” “broke signaling,” “further,” “over and over in memory,” “I get the feeling that,” “thought,” “end,” and “happened,” Seldess’s poems are doing something unique & amazing with internal rhyme, if rhyme can even begin to describe the incisive turns in meaning embodied by closely aligned consecutive lines like “One word the other/One heard the other”.
These seemingly subtle shifts gather force & momentum as the poems spiral toward a convergent sense of understanding. Seldess reveals the limitless significance locked within a limited lexicon, the way that sensitive readers of human events & human intelligence continue to uncover insights buried beneath the rubble of history. These poems ring the changes of language, and I want to call this ringing an ethics. This book revolves around the notion of endings and does itself eventually end, but the haunting value of its feelingthinking-space lives on.
Displaying 1 of 1 review