Abstraktion und Einfuhlung

“Everett’s talent is multifaceted, sparked by a satiric brilliance that could place him alongside Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison . . .” —Publishers Weekly

Chris Abani has developed his groundbreaking Black Goat poetry series with exciting and provocative new voices. Here, Percival Everett proves that his fine literary talents move far beyond the realm of the novel.

If you said “cubism” fifteen times, you would be getting close to some of what Percival Everett, a famous novelist and gifted painter himself, is playing with in this new book of poems. In words that mimic process, the poems here attempt to reverse the canvas, taking perspective and skewing it to reflect the world around it, spiraling into the work as a way to get out of it. Often what stands in the way of art is art itself, a lingering delusion that there is such a thing as beauty, especially universal beauty. The same is true of a belief in transcendence. To buy into it is to merely substitute one word for another, to fall prey to a correspondence theory of truth.