perennial fashion presence falling

perennial fashion presence falling / Fred Moten / Wave Books, May 2, 2023 -$20

Fred Moten’s perennial fashion presence falling revels in the full sensuous range of poetic language as aural and visual medium. Animated by homonymous play and an ever-shifting typography, Moten’s new book of poems concerns itself with the question of whether a transhistorical self subjected to dehumanizing racial violence can be reclaimed or reasserted through art. How does one craft a black aesthetic toward this aim? What if the poetic “I” as a form of lyrical self-assertion has always been a myth, obfuscating the inherent collaborativeness of the artistic process as a natural complement to the mutuality of human life?

Both word-by-word and thematically, this is a book that demands a particular kind of readerly attention. Moten’s language is often unruly––unruled by the extant and inventive. Several times while reading, I found myself searching prefixes in the OED to try and piece together his meanings. The book invites readers to contend with the problems of interpretation, heightened by the proliferation of polysemic words that hold all of their resonances––isotopic words that appear less like linguistic units and more like self-contained shoals of lexical possibility. Encounter poems that shirk an aspiration to unitary expression––lines that hold images unrecognizably transfigured from one end to the other. Dig it.   

--Yeukai Zimbwa