Musical, experimental and inventive poetry from the winner of the 2006 National Book Award. Influenced by a wide variety of musical traditions, Nathaniel Mackey's mutable and innovative poetry proposes an audience that has abandoned its expectations for poetry and that, instead, is prepared to "enter a liminal state" in which those expectations can be reimagined. Like musical artists John Cage or Ornette Coleman, Mackey presents his poems not as static aesthetic objects, but as ongoing sites of experiment and invention. This is poetry that feels live-- electric, happening right now-- yet it repays reencouter even more fully by teaching its readers first how to listen, and then how to listen differently. With Craig Santos Perez holloway.english.berkeley.edu/

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