Decoherence

by Nate Pritts

Poetry. Quiet, introspective, and darkly comedic, Nate Pritts' DECOHERENCE gathers strength like a giant wave. Pritts' syntax declares an argument for his style that calls up Frank O'Hara in its blend of playfulness with the slow machinations of the speaker's psyche.

At some moments elegant, lyrical, and seamless; at others limping and broken, DECOHERENCE nevertheless swims along purposefully across leaps and omissions, navigating both tension and ease in a series of emotional risks.

"Reading Nate Pritts' new collection DECOHERENCE, I am reminded of the phrase 'do you see what I am saying?' Although the images in the poems vary, light is one element that runs 'Everything, it seems, is just waves of light' and 'I know that the only gift we can give to someone else / is context for all this light' and 'In morning light we are finally / cleansed of happening.' In fact, the final word is, literally, light. Enter these stanzas with Nate and see what he's saying. Be illuminated by DECOHERENCE."—Kimiko Hahn

Genres: Poetry

70 pages, Paperback

Published September 1, 2017

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.”

Reviews

[Shelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's been this trend lately, a glut really, of what I've been calling "Tumblr poetry" being published – and I don't just mean online, but in real, tree-killing books. And in this day and age where we're all so desperately looking for meaning, but can apparently only handle it in Internet-ready chunks, collections of this "Tumblr poetry" are selling like hotcakes.

Just out of morbid curiosity, I read a couple of such volumes. In my review of the last one I read, I lamented that the popularity of this insipid fad (for which, as you have very likely surmised by now, I do not have a great amount of respect), in passing for the already under-represented genre of real poetry, is outshining the actual poets whose works deserve to be read. Nate Pritts and his 2017 collection DECOHERENCE is one of them.

Personal – sometimes quite intimate – and vulnerable, the poems of DECOHERENCE follow the changing, the evolution, and the sometimes complete breakdown of our connections – with each other, with our world, and with ourselves. They examine these connections over time, offering a sometimes stark contrast between the memories we hold in our minds' eye and the chaos of modern communication via phones, voicemail, the Internet, etc. Distances grow not only over time and space, but even across light years of mere emotion, separating us slowly, painfully, from even those who are most near to us. This is a beautiful, poignant, and, ironically, coherent collection!

Excerpt (from "DECOHERENCE suite // 4"):

Here I am haunted by previous iterations
 that are no longer / engaged
with any contemporaneous struggle
 toward knowledge / feeling.

That decoherence is the natural state
 of all elements since

organization is a lie we tell ourselves.

3.75 stars.

I received a completed copy of this book at no cost from the author, via Goodreads Giveaways. As always, my method of acquisition has no bearing on the content of my reviews.

The author also included his separately-bound essay, "Origin Stories", which I reviewed separately.