Jeffrey Herrick’s poetry, in an essentially celebratory mode, performs a disruption of language as we know it, a veritable violence that only the rarest poets authorize themselves to allow. It’s an unprecedented genre created in the spirited interest of language self-reinvention. How we read poetry undergoes here the kind of transformation that awakens its inherent potential—the possibility for embodying what Charles Olson called our further nature. And it’s work with a concrete, visual dimension that occupies the space between many languages—a work in diversity by a polyglot American poet who has lived for decades abroad from the Middle East to Japan. The author of several previous books, this is Herrick’s first to appear in this country.
Jerome John McGann is an American academic and textual scholar whose work focuses on the history of literature and culture from the late eighteenth century to the present.
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