The Little Edges "With its jazz exuberance, the book has the maverick spirit of one of its heroes, the multi-media artist Ralph Lemon: no hierarchy, no fluidity, no care-ridden pursuit of time, just bold, wild, delirious genius Moten is intent above all on not being anybody's 'Project.' Anarchronistically whimsical and erotic, his writing consolidates the spirit of jazz well beyond the aim and resources of a Langston Hughes or even an Amiri Baraka. But like Baraka he's a teacher; he instructs as well as delights." — Calvin Bedient, Lana Turner Journal
The Little Edges
The Little Edges is a collection of poems that extends poet Fred Moten's experiments in what he calls "shaped prose"—a way of arranging prose in rhythmic blocks, or sometimes shards, in the interest of audio-visual patterning. Shaped prose is a form that works the "little edges" of lyric and discourse, and radiates out into the space between them. As occasional pieces, many of the poems in the book are the result of a request or commission to comment upon a work of art, or to memorialize a particular moment or person. In Moten's poems, the matter and energy of a singular event or person are transformed by their entrance into the social space that they, in turn, transform. PURCHASE https://www.powells.com/book/little-edges-9780819576705
