Powers: Track III- from SD

Paradise is the track we're following in this poem, the spoor we're on, the prey we're tracking. . . .
Reworking a poetic midrash in the light of Jabès, availing himself of a deceptively simple
poetic line which has antecedents in Michael Palmer's recent work, and then referring to
scriptural hermeneutics throughout, Finkelstein has created an amazing new kind of poem:
as tensile as it is frangible, as spiritually reviving as it is philosophically zeroing.
Peter O’Leary, Cultural Society

Duncan, late in his life, arrived in a similar neighborhood when he began to leave
the poems of "Passages" unnumbered. They would no longer be a sequence -
from Latin sequor, "follow" - but a cluster, a constellation of poems that could be
entered at any point, read in any order. The "order" of "Passages," then, is something
like that described in a sentence of Emerson's Finkelstein paraphrases: "The center is
everywhere / and the circumference nowhere" Jacket Magazine

The act of reading, after all, always leaves "some other's / dreams" at least
partially "enfolded in the self." Finkelstein's gift, in Track, lies in his ability to
stay half self-conscious and half spellbound by those others' dreams. Sajl Magazine

Finkelstein’s Track undertakes a voyage beset by recombinatory duress. An excursus
through realms where “the letters / arrive to be destroyed,” this wickedly wise poem keeps
on arriving long after it's done-a lingering track or trade of mind in mind, trouble in mind.
It is a beautiful, beguiling book of unrest. Nathaniel Mackey

Track beautifully reminds us that pain and uncertainty are “to be exchanged for music.” This
is a haunting “broken crown” of a poem in which language’s power to name transmutes loss
simultaneously into celebration and epiphany. Michael Heller

For a long time now, Norman Finkelstein has exercised the most deep intelligence and
music in our poetry, on behalf of Poetry. In Track, his gifts travel to zenith. The cumulative
sense and soul of so many passages ventured, so many thresholds crossed, shed a perfect
radiance. In Track, the light is solid. Donald Revell

Norman Finkelstein is the author of Restless Messengers and three volumes of literary criticism, the most recent of
which is Not One of Them In Place: Modern Poetry and Jewish American Identity. He lives in Cincinnati, where
he is a Professor of English at Xavier University.