Early Autumn

Author: Ted Pearson

Publisher: Chax (2025)

In this vibrant collection Ted Pearson casts a deadpan, but entrancing, spell, offering an obliquely generative model for a poetics of disjunctive connection as well as a sly, trenchant engagement with mid-20th Century history at the micro and macro-levels: “To compose words is to place them in the space-time of their textual becoming. Their order of bloom details where they’ve been.” Composed in block-like stanzas these poems play at the edge of maxim and folk saying, at once confirming and ironizing the traditional power of such forms to provide comfort and wisdom. To write into such forms is to build a slender bulwark against erasure. “But the future we hoped for has disappeared.” Not here, though. Signage on a forgotten road, maybe. But lovely and deep.  — Patrick Pritchett