Goodbye Letter

Concrete and permutational poems celebrating a serene atrophy of language, from the author of My Vibe

In his latest collection, Goodbye Letter, New York-based poet Jeremy Sigler (born 1968) deconstructs his very will to write, as he articulates, verbally and graphically, the implied obsolescence of language itself. 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 on the poet’s “speaking” heart. Sigler’s newest collection may be seen as a field guide to a poet’s last gasp.