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Force Drift: An Essay in the Epic
In his extraordinary second collection, poet Jeffrey Pethybridge confronts the ethical disaster of the torture program that the United States used to advance the so-called global war on terror.
The poems in Force Drift recall Gilles Deleuze’s insight that art “is not a matter of reproducing or inventing forms, but of capturing forces.” Through the formal range of this dynamic sequence, Pethybridge achieves something like a synthesis of Deleuze’s opposition whereby the invention of poetic form becomes the very means of capturing, registering “a reckoning lyric.”
The task of reckoning renders visible the violence of the state that lies at the heart of the matter precisely because the state intends to conceal or justify its brutality through the invocation of emergency powers, as well as the state of exception, or how the state disappears persons in its network of black site prisons. As the political scientist Darius Rejali has demonstrated, it is in fact democracies that have refined “invisible tortures” such as sensory deprivation, stress-positions, and the waterboard.
Working at the intersection of documentary poetics and theories of the epic, Pethybridge recommits poetry to a responsibility for a description of history. As a poet-researcher, he “what would be possible…if listening / were the leading-form of being.” Driven by argument, abstraction, and assemblage, the poems in Force Drift address themselves to the irreparable, the “traumaeffect,” within the war on terror’s record of atrocity. Force Drift is a cri de coeur, political critique, and essay in the epic.
Against the world-destroying violence of the US torture program, Force Drifts juxtaposes a catalog of energies, forms, and genres. It is abolitionist, citational, architectural, chromatic, and replete with visual poetries ranging from the arabasques of tzahibs to erasures to extreme measures of leading and kerning. Even when its language is reduced to the pure transcription of pain––”aiai aiai aiai”––Force Drift is committed to aliveness and embodiment as “final treaty of the person,” as conscience and counterworld to the history as catastrophe of US imperialism, “irrefutable as the sun to the eye.”
The poems in Force Drift recall Gilles Deleuze’s insight that art “is not a matter of reproducing or inventing forms, but of capturing forces.” Through the formal range of this dynamic sequence, Pethybridge achieves something like a synthesis of Deleuze’s opposition whereby the invention of poetic form becomes the very means of capturing, registering “a reckoning lyric.”
The task of reckoning renders visible the violence of the state that lies at the heart of the matter precisely because the state intends to conceal or justify its brutality through the invocation of emergency powers, as well as the state of exception, or how the state disappears persons in its network of black site prisons. As the political scientist Darius Rejali has demonstrated, it is in fact democracies that have refined “invisible tortures” such as sensory deprivation, stress-positions, and the waterboard.
Working at the intersection of documentary poetics and theories of the epic, Pethybridge recommits poetry to a responsibility for a description of history. As a poet-researcher, he “what would be possible…if listening / were the leading-form of being.” Driven by argument, abstraction, and assemblage, the poems in Force Drift address themselves to the irreparable, the “traumaeffect,” within the war on terror’s record of atrocity. Force Drift is a cri de coeur, political critique, and essay in the epic.
Against the world-destroying violence of the US torture program, Force Drifts juxtaposes a catalog of energies, forms, and genres. It is abolitionist, citational, architectural, chromatic, and replete with visual poetries ranging from the arabasques of tzahibs to erasures to extreme measures of leading and kerning. Even when its language is reduced to the pure transcription of pain––”aiai aiai aiai”––Force Drift is committed to aliveness and embodiment as “final treaty of the person,” as conscience and counterworld to the history as catastrophe of US imperialism, “irrefutable as the sun to the eye.”
262 pages, Paperback
Published September 8, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 18, 2026
I kind of wish I shelled out for the deluxe version because it does make just some words unreadable as is (really only in the beginning pages). It doesn't ruin the whole thing obviously, just a little thought.
Beautiful, beautiful book. I think the research that Pethybridge put into this, all of the sources and perspectives culled from the world to tell this story, amounts to something that is carefully realized. It creates a mood of mourning, of being lost in the rubble, directionless and then specifically pinpointing what (the US military complex, or maybe just the US as a whole) is behind this nightmare.
And God, when there is a focus on what the hostages went through during their time, it is just some of the most harrowing accounts of torture ever.
I don't think the art aspect of this always works and I sometimes get lost in what the author was trying to say. Overall a terrific book.
Beautiful, beautiful book. I think the research that Pethybridge put into this, all of the sources and perspectives culled from the world to tell this story, amounts to something that is carefully realized. It creates a mood of mourning, of being lost in the rubble, directionless and then specifically pinpointing what (the US military complex, or maybe just the US as a whole) is behind this nightmare.
And God, when there is a focus on what the hostages went through during their time, it is just some of the most harrowing accounts of torture ever.
I don't think the art aspect of this always works and I sometimes get lost in what the author was trying to say. Overall a terrific book.
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May 19, 2026hmmm. probably need to reread.
March 25, 2026
absolutely insane book and worth millions of eyes. why aren’t people reading this
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews