Decay Studies U.S. Edition

Seefahrt's poems are in fact more than poems, they instigate a language-based laboratory, a way of being close to poiesis-in- process, giving witness to something like private loss of energy inside a ritual, or radioactive decay within the poetic artefact. -Sean Borodale, author of Bee Journal and Inmates If Strand's famous speaker declares itself 'the absence of field,' Seefahrt's insists itself, not through a preponderance of self- reflection, but through an almost monastic attention to the external world. Decay Studies models for us a practice of looking so closely that edges, wounds, holes, absences, and 'nothings' provide a ground for full being where the ablative is a path to the good. - Meghan Maguire Dahn, author of Domain If to read Arthur Seefahrt's acutely perceptive Decay Studies feels like an act of close looking, then the inverse is no less true-the act of looking at these poems is presented as a form of close, even worshipful, reading. With an investigator's exactitude, Seefahrt pores over the objects of this world as they appear and interact in a series of environments, almost as if to solve the mystery of their being there, if not the mystery of being itself. Formally inventive, scrupulously executed, and in a language that spans with ease the intricately figurative and the profoundly mystical, Decay Studies is a breathtaking debut, and one whose ostensible focus might be decay, but whose achievement is decay's opposite-preservation. ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ -Timothy Donnelly, author of Chariot and The Problem of the Many