Fourier Series

by Joshua Corey

Fourier Series, a book of poetry by Joshua Corey published on Charles Fourier's 233rd birthday (April 7th, 2005), is the winner of the Fitzpatrick-O'Dinn Award for Best Book Length Work of Constrained English Literature (2004), as judged by Christian Bök, author of Eunoia. The book comes wrapped in French Revolution an oversized engraving of the Crown Imperial (Fritillaria imperialis) by the apothecary Basilius Bester (1561-1629).

Genres: Poetry

102 pages, Perfect Paperback

First published February 1, 2005

About the author

Joshua Corey writes poetry, fiction, and criticism. Lately he's been writing science fiction novels!

His recent publications include:

- How Long Is Now (Spuyten Duyvil Publishing, 2022), a novel.
- Hannah and the Master (MadHat Press, 2021), poetry.
- The Transcendental Circuit: Otherworlds of Poetry (MadHat Press, 2018), criticism.
- Partisan of Things (Kenning Editions, 2016), a new translation (with Jean-Luc Garneau) of rancis Ponge's 1942 book of prose poems, Le Parti pris des choses,

He lives in Evanston, Illinois with his wife and daughter and is a Professor of English at Lake Forest College.

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

While there was an ear to be heralded, a technique of guileless figurative residuum by which to be ravished in Joshua Corey's first book, Selah (2003), there was also in that first book a vulgarity that nags at me, the fine-sounding Crane-esque metonymies flashing our admiration forward in a way to deny rewards our attention tenders. It's all too easy to read, to be puzzled and delighted by, to put down, to not return to. I like Corey's second book, Fourier Series (2005), a good deal more. This 100 page book maps several kinds of thought on top of each other -- is, indeed, a Frederick Merk-type account of a tradition's interior: the tradition of utopian, process-oriented poetics as they emerge from Merk's student, Charles Olson. If there's an easiness within that tradition (as there had been within the Stevensian/Graham line in Selah), there's also remarkable fluency in Olsonian-type form, for example the four-panel modular grid on verso and recto of nearly two-thirds of Fourier Series's pages, the seven-line fragments within each module often combining into little songs, often presenting the reader with a random-bourne decision of whether to read vertically, horizontally, or in some other "direction" -- in short, principles of arrangement, and design, are central to how this text imagines its readers operating within the myriad textual borders of page-grid, an operation that has something to do with how Merk, and his Harvard colleague, Frederick Jackson Turner, imagined the settlement of "space" in the Western U.S. territories, each border community working itself out through a series of rational choices Fourier himself tried to model in New Harmony, Indiana. In "Ambrotype" Corey sums up this project with: "Train the horsehair liar till space manifests duration. Found this evidencery." This last bit of punning on Corey's modular method alludes to Jonathan Williams' Jargon edition of Lorine Niedecker's poems, From This Condensary. The embrace of an American pastoral in this volume is nothing if not expansive.