Alkali

Author: Craig Dworkin 

Publisher: Counterpath Press (2015)

Alkali collects six works, including two desert pastorals describing the sonic and luminescent landscape surrounding the Great Salt Lake, two minimalist geometrical exercises exhausting the typographic limits of two particular oulippean constraints, a restaging of Clark Coolidge's The Crystal Text, and a long lyric essay on the rhetoric of falling in French modernism. Working from the linguistic toward the literary (in Paul de Man's sense of the terms), each of these poems attempts to construct a text of sonic density and impassioned argument from the entirely impersonal, inexpressive, chance motivations of the signifier. Together, they propose a mode of non-expressive poetics that seeks to evade the already clichéd styles and tones that have come to characterize the rhetoric of our present-day Conceptualism.