Jeremy Sigler: GOODBYE LETTER

In his latest collection, “Goodbye Letter,” the poet Jeremy Sigler puts his lyrical writing aside to play out an endgame of muses to deconstruct his poetry and his will to write – let alone speak – as he ruminates and articulates, verbally and graphically, the implied obsolescence of language itself, a deeply regressive technology of sorts, made up of phonemes, alphabets, metaphors, narratives, voices, and identities. The book feels less like a proper literary work (a book of poetry) and more like a manual for poetic survival. One poem reads like some sort of linguistic code that manages to murmur “it is what it is”; another is more classically “concrete,” reflecting on typewriter and pattern poems of past centuries; and another consists of a complete signature of unmarked blank pages (they await being torn out and curled up into a loose tube) as was the 19th century prototype for the stethoscope, but used this time to listen in, to spy, on the poet’s “speaking” heart. Sigler’s newest collection might be seen as a field guide to a poet’s last gasp. The book’s design give these very challenging, menacing and exceptionally unconventional poems a haven to breath and exist. One hopes that this goodbye letter will wave away slowly and dissolve over time, after being savored by readers.

Jeremy Sigler was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1968. After studying at the University of Pennsylvania and UCLA, he moved to Brooklyn and began writing poetry. He worked as a secretary for John Ashbery in the 1990s while working as an editor for the Swiss art journal, Parkett. In 2006, he received a Lannan Foundation Fellowship in Marfa, Texas. He is the author of numerous poetry collections, including To and To (1998), Mallet Eyes (2000), Math (2008), Crackpot Poet (2010), ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ (2014), and most recently, My Vibe (2017). He was the editor of the Dia Art Foundation exhibition catalog, Carl Andre; Sculpture as Place, 1958-2010 (2014). His art criticism has been published in many journals, magazines, exhibition catalogs and monographs, and he has taught art and literature in numerous colleges and universities.

Paperback
6.25 x 8.5 in. / 176 pgs

Distributed by Artbook / D.A.P.

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