To Whom It May Concern

By Edward Smallfield

Poetry. Ed Smallfield's TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN enters into the unfixity of time and experience. In this elusive realm, Smallfield unerringly finds the 'curve of binding energy' in which a protagonist who is an 'unself' emerges. Throughout Smallfield's lyric meditation, eros and erasure alternately fuse and efface until erasure becomes manifestation. Perhaps recollection creates sense of time's exile; Smallfield adeptly, bravely turns this inside out with 'a celebration that we own nothing.' His creative genius is to demonstrate the fullness of absence, whereby the poet can 'make a thing / by making / nothing.' Elizabeth Robinson

To read TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN is to learn to listen to the world all over again. Whether focused outward sludge, // soot slush, / slide tires or inward ...something about 'the music' in it... or on familiar texts the green / 'of wrist-thick' Ed Smallfield's exquisitely attuned language cultivates space for a greened attention, palpable and breathing. Here, silence and space also are fully alive, ...a sentence without words.... In his final, eponymous, section, Smallfield's profound attention to both presence and absence allows us to hear what beats just beneath the text of John Cage's Silence, a revelatory listening, in order to free / in it a space, an emptiness, // suddenly singing. Laura Walker

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1733137505
• ISBN13: 9781733137508
• Release Date: December 2019
• Publisher: Apogee Press
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 0.39 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 7.3" x 8.8"