WATTEN, Barrett
Zone: correlations (1973 2021)

Zone: correlations connects twelve poetic experiments that extract and recombine language from its limitless archives, generating new meanings for public and private life in our distressed present.

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

[publisher's note]

Published by chax, 2025
Poetry