ANC020: Things That Keep Us From Drifting by Andrew Ruzkowski
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Beginning with the premise that a new topography requires a new typography, Andrew Ruzkowski’s Things That Keep Us from Drifting powerfully reshapes the physical and linguistic field of the page. His fragments accumulate like musical phrases as they map a hybrid urban/natural landscape without trying to master it. Whether walking among the honey locusts or waiting for the train “in a city’s autumn,” Ruzkowski is listening with a keen, empathetic ear to “the sound of each other’s other.”
—Tony Trigilio, author of White Noise and Historic Diary Things That Keep Us from Drifting is a flowing, meandering, and at times discursive sequence of long poems that exists in the realm of the circadian; change is active on every page. Dailiness and nuance mark the alternatively long and short lines punctuating a white space/field that is as necessary as the utterance. Ruzkowski invites the reader to feel language as a product of environment, an organism. One wonders if this language emanates from the body, or vibrates in “the rotting weeds.” A dull humming builds within these pages. Ruzkowski acutely hears the urban landscape with an eye toward permaculture and wonders “Can this existence happen or just be a feeling/thought.” |
