Synopses & Reviews
Taking its inspiration from the work of Russian Absurdist authors such as Alexander Vvedensky and Daniil Kharms, Fur Not Light interrogates how deep senselessness runs in a post-truth and truthiness world. Incorporating serial poems such as "Nothing of the Month Club" and "December 32nd," as well as the long ideogram-based work "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living," Fur Not Light makes manifest the way that, as one of the poems in the volume puts it, "there's a difference between turning around and turning back."
Review
"Clear-eyed and evasive, the poems of Fur Not Light are poems of not-light and maybe also of not-wisdoms, in that they ponder rather the potential of wisdom in the non-ruminative, in such things as insects and sharks and days that do not exist and the deflective edges of language and meaning. To be human according to Fur Not Light is to be caught in the perpetual revolutions of one's awareness of paradoxes." Dao Strom
Review
"How the poet packs the emptiness of the American soulscape into the tightest, most unaccommodating space of poetry is a problem for the mathematicians of the future to solve." Andrew Joron
Review
"Hope and resignation tussle endlessly here like a Buddhist version of Laurel and Hardy. In Fur Not Light, wisdom has rhythm." Rae Armantrout
About the Author
Based in Portland, Oregon, Jeff Alessandrelli is a poet and essayist. In addition to his writing work Alessandrelli also directs the non-profit literary record label Fonograf Editions and hosts and produces the music/writing radio show The Steer. Recent work by Alessandrelli appears or is forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, The Spectacle, and The Hong Kong Review of Books, as well as at The Kenyon Review, where he's a staff blogger.