{"product_id":"force-drift-an-essay-in-the-epic-9781961209565","title":"Force Drift: An Essay in the Epic","description":"\u003cb\u003eIn his extraordinary second collection, poet Jeffrey Pethybridge confronts the ethical disaster of the torture program that the United States used to advance the so-called global war on terror. \u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e The poems in \u003ci\u003eForce Drift\u003c\/i\u003e recall Gilles Deleuze's insight that art \"is not a matter of reproducing or inventing forms, but of capturing forces.\" Through the formal range of this dynamic sequence, Pethybridge achieves something like a synthesis of Deleuze's opposition whereby the invention of poetic form becomes the very means of capturing, registering forces: \"a reckoning lyric.\" \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e The task of reckoning renders visible the violence of the state that lies at the heart of the matter precisely because the state intends to conceal or justify its brutality through the invocation of emergency powers, as well as the state of exception, or how the state disappears persons in its network of black site prisons. As the political scientist Darius Rejali has demonstrated, it is in fact democracies that have refined \"invisible tortures\" such as sensory deprivation, stress-positions, and the waterboard. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e Working at the intersection of documentary poetics and theories of the epic, Pethybridge recommits poetry to a responsibility for a description of history. As a poet-researcher, he asks: \"what would be possible...if listening \/ were the leading-form of being.\" Driven by argument, abstraction, and assemblage, the poems in \u003ci\u003eForce Drift \u003c\/i\u003eaddress themselves to the irreparable, the \"traumaeffect,\" within the war on terror's record of atrocity. \u003ci\u003eForce Drift\u003c\/i\u003e is a cri de coeur, political critique, and essay in the epic. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e Against the world-destroying violence of the US torture program, \u003ci\u003eForce Drifts \u003c\/i\u003ejuxtaposes a catalog of energies, forms, and genres. It is abolitionist, citational, architectural, chromatic, and replete with visual poetries ranging from the arabasques of tzahibs to erasures to extreme measures of leading and kerning. Even when its language is reduced to the pure transcription of pain--\"aiai aiai aiai\"--\u003ci\u003eForce Drift\u003c\/i\u003e is committed to aliveness and embodiment as \"final treaty of the person,\" as conscience and counterworld to the history as catastrophe of US imperialism, \"irrefutable as the sun to the eye.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eJeffrey Pethybridge\u003c\/b\u003e is a poet, editor, curator, and sound artist; he is the author of \u003ci\u003eStriven, The Bright Treatise\u003c\/i\u003e, which was selected as one of the ten best debuts of 2013 by \u003ci\u003ePoets \u0026amp; Writers\u003c\/i\u003e. He teaches in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, where he is director of the Summer Writing Program. In 2025 he'll serve as the curator of Enclave, a transdisciplinary poetry festival held in Mexico City each year.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Tupelo Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51705070387474,"sku":"9781961209565","price":14.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_f7025cf1-49c4-4583-9d22-a5cc4ff556bc.jpg?v=1762338494","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/force-drift-an-essay-in-the-epic-9781961209565","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}