James Byrne’s first book to be published in America navigates personal and socio-political worlds, journeying through Burma, Libya, and Syria along with documenting the poet’s years in New York City and subsequent return to England. This is a flexible poetry written “on the hoof,” nomadic and innovative, with imagery and language dexterously sparring. Byrne embraces Maurice Blanchot’s avowal that the fragmentary is permanent, “beyond fracturing, or bursting, the patience of pure impatience, the little by little suddenly.” With linguistic tenacity but by tremendously varied means, Byrne shows how “everything that is broken up dances.”

James Byrne is a poet, editor, and translator born near London, England, where he now lives again after completing an MFA as a Stein Fellow at New York University. His most recent poetry collections in the United Kingdom are Blood/Sugar and White Coins (Arc Publications, 2009 and 2015). He is the editor of The Wolf, a renowned poetry journal he co-founded in 2002, and also co-editor of Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century (Bloodaxe Books, 2009). Byrne teaches at Edge Hill University and was previously Poet in Residence at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge.