Zone (1973-2021) Format: Trade Paperback

Usually, when a book of poetry has a date range on the cover spanning almost fifty years, I assume I am looking at a “ selected” or “ collected” poems. Let the reader not be fooled: Zone is something new. The correlations in this remarkable book take parataxis on mind-spinning trips across time, place, genre, medium, language, and author, producing strikingly emotional results. There are affecting pieces where personal and collective losses appear, touch, and wink away; there are larger canvases on which whole literary and social histories are re-understood and put in new motion; there are notes which carry their own emotional power. Throughout, there is the characteristic Watten tone, the reader’ s building sense that the cool, polished surfaces of these lines are somehow, and barely, managing to contain a kind of analytic fury — David Kellogg, on Zone

Barrett Watten’ s concept of “ zone” has many sources. One extends back to his boyhood in Taiwan, a zone of its own, poised between China and Japan, with sea all around. That early space between has a bearing on his lifelong exploration of zones of thought, zones of language, zones of conflict. As a poet, he emerges out of Robert Creeley, Ted Berrigan, Joanne Kyger, and Anselm Hollo, onward to Robert Grenier and Clark Coolidge, Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky, and into community with the Language poets and their theoretical biographies around a Grand Piano.