Winter Constellations

by Nate Pritts

A note in the back of Nate Pritts’s Winter Constellations (horse less press, $5) clues one in to his method of self-collage, wherein his older poems become direct source material for this chapbook, which, he writes, “is meant to be, in itself, an act of memory.” Read through such a lens, the often totemic imagery (e.g. light, breath, darkness, air) that Pritts uses and re-uses activates a kind of non-linear narrative space; just as an event in one’s memory carries with it numerous ancillary associations and other possible memories, one often melding into the other, so the phrases and bits of language here carry with each new appearance something of their initial deployment, bringing to the work a momentum, one which thwarts the sense of time as progression or memory as static. Everything melts into everything else in the five sequences of these chilling star charts.

Noah Eli Gordon in Rain Taxi.

30 pages, chapbook

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Nate Pritts is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Post Human (2016) and Decoherence (2017). Publishers Weekly described his fifth book, Sweet Nothing (2011), as “both baroque and irreverent, banal and romantic, his poems […] arrive at a place of vulnerability and sincerity.” POETRY Magazine called his The Wonderfull Yeare (2009), “rich, vivid, intimate, & somewhat troubled” while The Rumpus called Big Bright Sun (2010) “a textual record of mistakes made and insights gleaned…[in] a voice that knows its part in self-destruction.”