In the Mode of Disappearance
by JONATHAN WEINERT
Winner of the 2006 NIGHTBOAT POETRY PRIZE
Chosen by Brenda Hillman
How can we fully inhabit our own being without doing violence to a world that may be more perfect without us? If the best poem is silence, then how might we articulate the astonishing and terrible facts of our own experience? In the Mode of Disappearance reverses the direction of William Blake’s alchemical journey, moving clockwise from North to West, from center to circumference—from the abstract and disembodied to the sensual, particular, and placed. By turns formal and experimental, discursive and fragmentary, In the Mode of Disappearance seeks to build, at the intersection of appearing world and disappearing self, a poetry that can account for and preserve the integrity of both.
ISBN 9780976718574
104 pages
$14.95
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Praise for JONATHAN WEINERT
Jonathan Weinert’s award-winning collection, In the Mode of Disappearance, transcends contemporary categories of traditional and experimental, existing in a mode in which the quality of thought itself is paramount. Like Wallace Stevens and William Blake before him, his is a poetry that reaches the summit of philosophy without being shorn of song. Throughout the collection, Weinert draws upon a range of classical and postmodern strategies, dexterously integrating them with a series of non-poetic modes and constructs (including the four cardinal directions, the nine non-zero digits and the major arcana of the Tarot) in a humane effort to build a bulwark against the forces of fragmentation and disappearance. In so doing, Weinert’s poems forge a continuum of human knowledge in which, as Edith Sitwell once wrote, “the fire of the heart and the fire of the mind” are one.
—Foreword by Brenda Hillman
Inventive as hell, within its own formal limitations and liberations, In the Mode of Disappearance is as thinking as it is feeling, and never solely linear. It charts the progression of the soul, fleeing and in constant flight, while confronting the known possibilities of new earth and after-earth. A contemporary, non cultish, spirituality fuels Weinert’s prosody, neo sermonish. And yes, the pages, hot with what Aimé Césaire calls Poetic Knowledge, almost glow. This is an amazing debut. The beginning of what happens after “the leaving,” not just “the healing,” has begun.
—Thomas Sayers Ellis
Jonathan Weinert has more emotional and technical range than almost any contemporary poet I know of. These poems move easily between high formalism and experimentalism, always with wit, sonic inventiveness and erudition. Finally, though, it is his human insight and lyrical subtlety that will make In the Mode of Disappearance one of the best poetry books to be published this year. Jonathan Weinert is a marvelous writer, one I hope to read more from.
—Kevin Prufer
About JONATHAN WEINERT
Jonathan Weinert has published poems and reviews in many journals, including American Letters & Commentary, Pleiades, The Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, LIT, and 32 Poems. In the Mode of Disappearance is his first book of poems. He has many years experience editing, desiging, and producing books and Web sites, and serves as Web editor for the letterpress literary journal Tuesday: An Art Project. A graduate of Brandeis University and the Spalding University MFA Creative Writing Program, Jonathan grew up in Wellesley, MA, and has lived in Massachusetts for most of his life. For additional information, please go to jonathanweinert.net.
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