
Sweep
David Abel(Author)
Bull City Press
Published on 20. May 2026
Book
Paperback/Softback
220 pages
978-1-946104-69-4 (ISBN)
Description
Sweep is not a long poem or a series of short poems but a log of practice, determined / to find a structure to inhabit to bits. The form's generosity lets the bits live, passes them along, unforeseeable, irregular, and ordinary. It tells us what it is as it goes: The Encyclopedia of Unfinished Business. But also, A library is a cemetery in which every grave has a voice, and can speak. In this openwork, isolate moments float in silence, cottonwood-fluff light, carried together by a wandering ground bass. Did I say silence? Made of words: no single poems but a noncount poetry, including even a certain unmodified noun. This notation can be laugh-out-loud funny-- Big 12 defense a sieve? That's grudge talk.-- or gently devastating-- Everyone leads three simultaneous lives: / their hidden work, their death, and their disguise.-- or both at once.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
Illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 209 mm
Width: 152 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-946104-69-4 (9781946104694)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
David Abel is a poet, editor, and interdisciplinary artist, and the proprietor of Passages Bookshop in Portland, Oregon. With a group of friends he founded the Spare Room reading series in 2002, still going strong in its twenty-fourth year. The author of more than two dozen books, chapbooks, artist's books, and text objects, his most recent publications are a chapbook of poems, Equifinality, from Crane's Bill Books in Albuquerque, NM; two books based on performance scores -- XIV Eclipses and Selected Durations. An expanded bilingual book of the Eclipses is coming from Escandalar (Mexico).