Presentable Art of Reading Absence (American Literature (Dalkey Archive)) - Softcover

"Jay Wright is one of the five or six living American poets whose work will survive." -- Harold Bloom

"Jay Wright is a brilliant and Original poet difficult and allusive, beating his own unpredictable path through a variety of terrains." -- John Hollander

"Wright is an intellectual poet, a poet's poet, upon whose tabula rasa may be read influences of Dante, Eliot, the African griots, Alejo Carpentier, and Nicolas Guillen."

"Wright invites us to roam the cultures of the transatlantic world, to speak and know many tongues, to partake of the rituals through which we may be initiated into modes of individual and communal enhancement. In yet another age of great uncertainty, Wright enables us to imagine that breaking the vessels of the past is more an act of uncovering than of sheer destruction, and that we need not necessarily choose between an intellectual and a spiritual life, for both can still be had." -- Robert B. Stepto

With occult emotionality and analytic brilliance, Jay Wright has written the user's guide to evanescence' -GoodReads

The Presentable Art of Reading Absence takes as impulse the act of meditation, in which the energetic relationship between a meditative body and its universe is not only the envisioning of absence by presence but also vision itself: "Here begins the revelation of a kiosk." With occult emotionality and analytic brilliance, Jay Wright has written the user's guide to evanescence: "I have become attuned / to the disappearance of all things / and of my self ..." This is not the postmodern removal of subjectivity from artistic creation, nor is it a motioning toward death or finality; it is, instead, the literal removal of a self from noisy, populated ruins and its return to being.