Unsun - by Andrew Zawacki (Paperback)

About the Book

The author's poetry can be described as works that aspire "to conjugate in a future imperfect,"but a future nonetheless.

Book Synopsis

Poetry that aspires 'to conjugate in a future imperfect, ' but a future nonetheless.

In his fifth poetry volume, American poet Andrew Zawacki expands his inquiry into the possibilities and dangers of a 'global pastoral, ' exploring geographies alternately enhanced and flattened out by digital networks, international transit, the uneven and invisible movements of capital, and the unrelenting feedback loops of data surveillance, weather disaster, war. Wheeling interference patterns of systems of meaning, from radio signals and runway signage to foreign phrases and babytalk, interact with the 'langscape' of English, while punctuation is retrofitted as coding. In creating a politically committed lyric form that opens all the dimensions of language - sonic and semantic, syntactic and graphic - Unsun sustains an oblique conversation with Paul Celan's Fadensonnen, Chris Marker's Sans soleil, and Michael Palmer's Sun. Loosely structured by the settings of analog photography, the book features a suite of the author's black-and-white, large format images alongside an adaptation of Tang Dynasty poet Wang Wei and a series of fractured sonnets for - and from - his young daughter.

Review Quotes

"Unsun is a cycle of forms as vibrant as it is sparse, an arc from sonnet to quatrain to layered ekphrasis through elsewhere and nowhere to sonnet again, dis- and re- engaging with established poetic shapes at its own self- guided will." - Zach Peckham, American Book Review

"Here is a language of dizzying swerves and connections, open at the borders, even to bilingual puns. " - Rosmarie Waldrop, author of Splitting Image

"In Unsun, a book of miraculous accounting, we are invited from the subtitle onward to consider not only the idea of the sharpest image -- which f/11 might provide -- but also how the information that images conduct ranges. The work beckons with a multiply-stated question -- how close can you get? As the world moves in the poems and the writing multiplies, we're drawn to the materials and processes that verge throughout, that edge up -- with something next to a child's voice -- into this indexing of near kisses and satellite navigations. Unsun tracks -- or endeavors, terrifyingly and beautifully, to track -- 'what is never not touching us. '" - C. S. Giscombe

About the Author

Andrew Zawacki is the author of the poetry volumes Videotape, Petals of Zero Petals of One, Anabranch, and By Reason of Breakings, as well as four books in France. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Nation, and elsewhere. With fellowships from the NEA, Centre National du livre, and French Voices, he translated Sébastien Smirou's My Lorenzo and See About. Zawacki also edited Afterwards: Slovenian Writing 1945-1995 and edited and co-translated Ales Debeljak's Without Anesthesia: New and Selected Poems. A recent Howard Foundation Poetry Fellow, he is Professor of English at the University of Georgia.