Disintegration and Other Poems

"Jeff Fort's Disintegration is like a mysterious peacock's plumage: from the start you are swimming in strange beauty, as you slowly recognize that it has many eyes. The book has one eye on the experimental traditions of modernist invention, one on the catastrophe of the present, another eye on dreams, another still with a precise eye on language. But finally it has all eyes on something else: 'what matters is pure utopia, ' as it reminds us, against forgetting, against blindness."

-Joshua Clover, author of The Totality for Kids (UC Press) and Red Epic (Commune Editions)

"Disintegration is a 'thinking thing, ' a 'thinking kind of thread.' A 'murmur, ' it says of itself, or a buzz or a rattle. I would say it's a song, mostly muffled, with an on-and-off beat, at the tail end of human life on earth. It's 'the call of all that's left.' You can see as well as hear it in letters that come apart, change places, drop out and misspell the words that try even now to gather up the whole business, remember, and return someplace. Home? They ring with a hollow ring that is a ring nonetheless-a strange, unfamiliar sound, for all its obsolescence. The 'call of all that's left' is something unexpected; it is new."

-Ann Smock, author of The Play of Light: Jacques Roubaud, Emmanuel Hocquard and Friends (SUNY Press)

Jeff Fort was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, studied at Columbia University in New York, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Strasbourg in France, and now teaches literature, film, and philosophy at the University of California, Davis. He has translated numerous books and shorter works, mostly from French as well as German and Italian. He has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for more than thirty years.