Fiction
Non-Fiction
Poetry
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 Track by Norman Finkelstein
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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
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.
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