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.”
