Apparent Magnitude

By Nathan E. White

"We sleep in language," Robert Kelly tells us, "if language does not come to wake us with its strangeness." Such awakening is one desired end of Nathan E. White's Apparent Magnitude. The voices in his poems speak always of the particular mystery of what it means to be a mind moving in the true world. Nothing is ordinary in his work. Nothing is certain. In one poem, absence is the "first language." In another, a student locates "the bird / at the topmost branch / singing intricately side to side." To read our world, White's splendid poems remind us, is to apprehend and relish pattern, a difficult joy. We must do this in time. -Douglas Smith, author of Judgments Usually when we read and write, we squint our eyes to help us focus and concentrate. Whitman, however, read and wrote with raised eyebrows to open his eyes as much as he could to let it all in and to be amazed. When I read Nathan E. White's poems, I read like Whitman, not intentionally, but because White's poems force my eyes open. My eyebrows are continually raised in amazement at the fresh language, the crisp images, the fluid movements, and by how well the poems close, tight like a well-made box, as Yeats would say. -Tom Holmes, Redactions: Poetry, Poetics, & Prose

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0615778240
• ISBN13: 9780615778242
• Release Date: April 2013
• Publisher: Aldrich Press
• Length: 90 Pages
• Weight: 0.42 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.2" x 6.0"