Restless Messengers is pleased to present two reviews of Mark Scroggins’ Zion Offramp 1-50, the first installment of one of the most exciting serial poems to appear in recent years. Scroggins’ earlier work is gathered in Damage: Poems 1988-2022 (here is Donald Revell’s review). In my Introduction to that book, I write that although Scroggins’ style could be described as “late postmodernism,” his poetry also embodies a longing to break free of irony and skepticism, to find an elsewhere, even if the way to fulfill that longing is through an equally strong desire for “the poem as damage.” This tension is still apparent in Zion Offramp, but much of the punk anger (John Matthias called Scroggins’ Red Arcadia “a pit bull of a book”) is now transformed—but not mellowed!—into an astonishingly comprehensive, at times gorgeously lyrical vision of our times, the moment after “Something happened.” Poignant yet unflinchingly truthful, richly informed by our cultural past yet entirely of the moment, this is poetry that demands our attention. Read on as Patrick Pritchett and Joseph Donahue, two poet-critics who themselves have produced poetic sequences of a very high order, take us closer to Scroggins’ “Blue City, city not of the One / or of the Many. Blue Oz. Blue Zion.”

—Norman Finkelstein

* * *

Mark Scroggins is perhaps best known as the scholar of Objectivist poet Louis Zukofsky. His two major works on Zukofsky, Louis Zukofsky and the Poetry of Knowledge (1998) and The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky (2007), are required reading for any would-be student of modernism. There are, in addition, numerous essays he has contributed over the years to various journals and collections that ably map the place held by the Objectivists in the modernist orbit, as well scintillating pieces on Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelites, and an entire book devoted to groundbreaking British SF writer Michael Moorcock. Many of his essays have been collected in Intricate Thicket: Reading Late Modernist Poetries (2015), The Mathematical Sublime: Writing about Poetry (2016), and Arcane Pleasures (2023). These are substantial, if not defining, contributions, to the fields of Victorian, modernist and postmodernist studies, learned yet never stuffy. Scroggins is nothing if not a superbly lucid stylist, whose prose makes one nostalgic for the heyday of Guy Davenport, Hugh Kenner, or even R.P. Blackmur. In other words, he is a pleasure to read.

At the same time, though, he’s been quietly bringing out a remarkable series of poetry titles, beginning with 2003’s Anarchy and culminating in the release of 2023’s vibrant Damage, which gathers together four separate titles with early uncollected poems. So it’s no surprise that the appearance of the first volume of his ongoing serial poem, Zion Offramp, comes as the bow wave of a fast moving man of war, or clipper ship. It’s major work—a poem of sweeping scope that, as both an interrogation of personal history and an indictment of late capitalist culture, takes no prisoners. Like much of his previous work, Zion Offramp carries the same incisive satirical bite wedded to a melancholy lyricism.

The fifty sections of Zion Offramp turn seriality into an instrument for producing an arresting degree of torsion and simultaneity. As the provocative title suggests, Zion Offramp is suffused with the appeal to what Walter Benjamin called a “weak messianic” power. Unlike a strong messianic power, which would, if it were able, achieve future historical outcomes in a utopian register, a weak messianic power can only alter and redeem our relationship to the past. Scroggins’ poetry works precisely in this vein, deftly turning a limitation into a powerful form of leverage:

Something happened. It’s always that way.
we look around, find ourselves in a place
we don’t recognize, among strangers, in clothes
we didn’t choose. Something happened. (1)

In this opening stanza the poem sounds an ominous, even enigmatic note. The time—and place—are out of joint. The theme of dislocation unfolds across the poem as it probes the experience of modernity from multiple vectors: imaginary scenes of madcap juxtaposition (“the victory at Little Big Horn,” “the ascent to heaven of Herbert Hoover”) as he writes in poem 7, “A Brief History of Epic Memory” (18). Side by side with these historical investigations Scroggins segues into passages of nostalgic yearning and recollection that call to mind the rhythms of Nathaniel Mackey’s long poem, “Song of the Andoumboulou.” Take the bittersweet recollections of youthful geekitude in search of some semblance of “the One”:

              We were in search
of the One, we were sitting
by the pool and geeking out, we were
              reclaiming those days of junior
              high, the garish
paperbacks, stalking barbarians
swords spells vast phallic
              serpents lowering clouds
              of sorcery. (24)

“the One was a kind/of strut, a way of walking/turn of the head and twist/of the pelvis.” Such is the stuff of utopian daydreams. And fledgling poetic imagination.

A lassitude, a weariness, runs through so many of these poems; they are not complaints about these bitter declinist times; rather elegies and mock-elegies for the absurdity of our species and its wanton ways, underwritten by a deep sadness. Poem 27 offers this plaintive postscript:

A flicker in the lights, a pop in the air, and
we knew – standing in the checkout line – that things
had returned to normal. That nothing could shock us
again, or anymore. (75)

And in Poem 34 we read a kind of corollary: “The question of history is a question of agency: who makes things happen?” (98)

For “who” here, perhaps one ought to read “what.” Is Scroggins subscribing to some vulgar Great Man theory of history? That hardly seems likely and yet “the question of history” is surely not to be resolved by ascribing its motions to individual agency. The real answer he provides later in the poem is lyrical, moving, and a cause for resignation, maybe. Or clarity. We cannot read history:

The evergreen moving silently under
the breeze, the skitter
of long-dead leaves on
the driveway, the far-off
car horn and the indistinct
but cutting child’s voice
a block away, all form
a single ideogram—needless
to say, illegible. (99)

Is the poet a bitter fatalist? An enlightened cynic? Or better still, a slyly subversive, melancholy utopianist? All three strains are in play here, restlessly intertwining in a perpetual roundelay. That the ideogram remains illegible detracts nothing from the experience of its tantalizing mystery, which promises the clarity of a luminous detail but remains cloaked in opacity.

At bottom Zion Offramp critiques the friction between capital and inner life. Or rather, it investigates, lays bare, how capital forms and deforms our inner lives. Subjectivity and capital are co-constitutive, one might say, with a backward glance at the heady critical ferment of the ’90s when that useful if recondite term appeared in so many scholarly essays and grad seminars.

Is Zion Offramp a long poem? Its segmented seriality flirts with that loose, baggy monster of a category: its open floor plan and rapid shifts in points of view allow it a capacious range of reference to multiple levels of experience. Yet it’s a closely jointed poem, too; tonally and rhetorically unified, with a tight lyrical intensity that resists the hubristic tendency to self-indulgence that the genre can often lead to. Scroggins nimbly avoids the logorrheic impulse. Dichtung still equals condensare.

The epigraph and coda from William Morris’ utopian fantasia, “The Hollow Land,” provides a topographical index to Zion Offramp:

Christ keep the Hollow Land
Through the sweet springtide,
When the apple blossoms bless
The lowly bent hill side.

The Hollow Land is not, as one might suppose, a waste land; rather, a region of happiness which overflows with ripe abundance, then all too quickly fades. It’s a place where hope is fulfilled, however fleetingly, a place not unlike that described by Walter Benjamin in which the weak messianic power can only intervene in the past in the hope of redeeming it for the ever-elusive present—not as a bridge, or mediating link, but as a place where time comes to a standstill, as Benjamin puts it; a temporary negentropic zone. In his rebuke of historical materialism, he writes “The past carries with it a secret index by which it is referred to redemption. Doesn’t a breath of the air that pervaded earlier days caress us as well? In the voices we hear, isn’t there an echo of now silent ones? … like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak messianic power, a power on which the past has a claim.” This is the landscape so brilliantly, poignantly brought to life in Zion Offramp.

The book shuttles effortlessly back and forth between the domestic, with its small pleasures and regrets, its economy of happenstance and its doleful confusions, and the larger sweep of history where lives are so many woodchips in the flood. Part of the book’s accomplishment is that these two strands never feel discordant. Instead, the intimate links that have always connected them is made to illuminate each more fully.

In Poem 47 Scroggins writes:

Antinomian drift, laws
and proportions lost. The weight, it turns out,
is history. That’s what makes your back
hurt, even first thing in the morning.
It’s history blunts your pencil lead,
misplaces the car keys, puts the wrong
foot in the right shoe. (138)

Zion Offramp is rife with echoes of poets Scroggins has long admired: at the level of the line and the vowel/consonant clasp, Nathaniel Mackey, a contemporary master of the long poem. And as a large-scale model, Geoffrey Hill, whose late turn to “the book-length meditative sequence,” as Scroggins has noted in a review, introduced to the British poet’s work a “persuasive sense of bitter humor, and newfound heteroglossia,” the kind that inflects such masterworks as The Orchards of Syon. Above all, the narrator of these poems may bring to mind a bemused Ancient Mariner, whose dire prophetic mien has been softened (or beaten down) by outings to Bed Bath & Beyond.

The poem ends on a plangent yet affirmative note, in the manner of Whitman, praising the random oddments of a girl’s childhood room (one of Scroggins’ own daughters, perhaps). The concluding lines of this poem still-in-progress attest to its ongoingness – not endless, but modestly bounded even as it runs in complex intertwining loops.

One’s self I sing, urban, suburban,
rural, self-contained and communal;
ordnance and bodies, the women
and men who died on the walls
of Capital, wore out or lost
their lives before the hundred
siege machines of Shareholding
and Compound Interest.
I sing the girl in her room with her space
heater, her surf posters, her violin; her
autographed posters, her You Tube
videos of big Broadway numbers, her smelly
dance shoes …
all the ambient music
to mask the intermittent murmurs and cries. (147-148)

Zion Offramp is one of the most compelling, absorbing, and powerful books of American poetry to be published in some years. Hugely ambitious, mingling irony with wistfulness, and throughout richly, wittily, wickedly lyrical, it draws a road map through the dissonance and minor sublimities of daily, mortal life, doing what poetry does best: building a negentropic machine against loss. It is not to be missed.

—Patrick Pritchett

Patrick Pritchett’s most recent book of poems, Sunderland, appeared in 2023 from Spuyten Duyvil. Scholarly work includes essays on Lorine Niedecker, Ronald Johnson, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Gustaf Sobin, and Michael Palmer. He has taught at Harvard, Amherst College, and Hunan Normal University and currently lectures in Comp Lit at Rutgers.

* * *

“We missed the exit, I thought”

I

How miss such a turn? It’s Zion, the place towards which all true paths tend. So might a novice reader wonder, so some traveler in a poem suppose, even as the exit flies by. But wait. A salvific qualification: the offramp may not have been missed. “We’ve missed the exit, I thought” (88). Perhaps it’s just that the poet’s soul is prey to the apprehension that, at least in his historical moment, Zion has come and gone? Who are these belated pilgrims who didn’t see the sign, assuming, that is, the sign to Zion, in a besieged and degraded world, hasn’t been rendered illegible by shotgun blasts? What might there be beyond Zion, that once ultimate endpoint, that destination stop still resonant with righteousness and redemption? Or are we, more immediately, just fleeing Babylon? Endpoints. Wrong turns. Upended quests. All these, and dauntless conviction, haunt the fifty sections of Mark Scroggins’s extraordinary new book length demi-poem, the first tranche of his long song, Zion Offramp, a serial poem periodically devastated by all that eschatology once and might yet still mean.

II

Wasn’t the North American landscape itself once Zion? Wasn’t it also Jerusalem, Eden, Paradise, and various Fourier inspired rest stops along the way, not to mention impromptu cultic headquarters popping up anywhere, like Keith Raniere’s NXIVM, in Albany? The principal landscapes of the poem, New York, New Jersey and that ongoing apocalypse, Florida, are proof, here, that the visionary landscape of the 19^th century poetry and painting is simultaneous with the present and inseparable from it. The most exalted passages in Zion Offramp are less the final sign of our long-delayed arrival, than a looking round and taking note in the spirit of an indolently advancing end-times. Whether passing or lingering, one senses that each moment in Zion Offramp is measured against some more expansive, generous sense of how life and world might yet be. The poet’s considerable powers of description are always on alert, ascertaining our distance from some possible fullness. Hence, Scroggins is particularly astute in his satires of both cultural and personal shortcomings. The brilliance of Zion Offramp lies in the finely calibrated degrees of incommensurability separating the real from the ideal.

Sometimes nothing in the world is worth saving. Passage upon passage of the poem strike a line through middle class consumer culture, which is always doing what it does best, transforming everything into degradation. But more often, the evaluation of how we live now is studied, turned at various angles, the poet aiming to unmingle the vulgar and the sublime. We might think of this as a critical posture of the poet towards his subject matter, but that would not be quite right. The gracefulness of the verse, its knack for effortlessly gliding from one reality to another, suggests that what the poet is after is more invocation than critique. He wants to show us the world as it is, the world we are all passing through on our way to whatever Zion now is, a trip during which the fantastical keeps happening. Zion Offramp is single-minded in its uncovering of an unsuspected doubleness. Scroggins, our premier expositor of all things Objectivist, keeps reconfiguring the Objectivist aesthetic, tweaking the real until the facts of the world take on the aura of a spiritual romance. In the following passage, the conveyance has shifted from car to train. We are passing from one level of reality to another, from ruination and debris, through the fantastical, and toward the otherworldly. Zion gives way to the forests of Tolkien and those forests to Stevens’ favorite color for all things the imagination touches, blue:

                                       Next stop is the end
          of the line – the tunnel under the river,
          out past the suburbs and the grand
          shelving landfill, horizons of shifting,
          spongy accumulation. We ascended
the stairhead, passed through the turnstiles.
A recorded voice told us our farecards
were no longer valid, could not be replaced.
No turning back, we emerged into the dawn
of a brilliant double sun, splintered
into a million reflections on the sea
          of broken electronics, discarded plumbing
          fixtures, brass and copper cogs and gears,
          zip-tied bundles of color-coded wire,
          fragments of plate glass windows,
          mirrors, pier glasses, tempered shelving,
          prescription glasses, and everywhere the snow-
flakes of shattered auto glass. Slow fires
smoldered beneath the heaps, lazy coils
of oily smoke unrolling themselves upward.
Somewhere beyond this Emyn Muil, they told us,
was the Blue City, city not of the One
or of the Many. Blue Oz. Blue Zion. (78-79)

III

Any visionary experience on New York subways tends to call to mind, sooner or later, “The Tunnel” section of The Bridge, where Hart Crane, in his own mythic riff on life in the American northeast, imagines moving through “interborough fissures of the mind.” Scroggins less dramatically transits, but his poem nonetheless moves us through planes of existence. In Zion Offramp, bodies are in motion, but it’s the transformation of the traveler that aligns, at least for me, Zion Offramp and Hart Crane’s poetry. It’s a route or at least a resonance between them that is made evident by the ever-approaching Zion, or what is beyond Zion, or even just the disappearance of the hope of reaching Zion, blue though it may be. (Oz though it may be, fantasy or sci-fi though it may be.) Like much in White Buildings, Zion Offramp is transcendence adjacent. Cranean inclinations are there to be felt in the geographic and experiential breadth of poetic materials, in the tortured erotic homilies, in the pained parodies of the fullness of life under capital, in the millennialism that seems washed clean of Christ, and, most powerfully, in displays of tenderness toward the suffering of others. The deepest affinity, however, is in Scroggins’s concern with the inner workings of the visionary spirit, a spirit which continually calls both poets before inner tribunals of conscience. Yes, Zion Offramp offers our moment the hopes of older times, and yes, Morris and Ruskin are along for the ride, as are their still affecting ideals of justice and beauty. Hope still hangs in the twenty-first century air, though Zion Offramp insists on doubting the worthiness of the poet, and so of his readers. Maybe no one earns a taste of greater life. Our road to Zion (or the exit beyond it, or the exit before it, or the end of the road itself) threads the hollows of catastrophic personal failure. However discretely managed, upheavals are part of the poetics. Through astringent self-denigration Scroggins finds a way to render the world. He derives his poetic form from the ever-vacillating state of the sojourner within it. Self-abjuration is an aid to composition. It also sounds an elusive but recurring cadence. Our mood swings occur in counterpoint to the richly detailed and richly felt worlds of experience that are songs we sing on our road to nowhere. As in Crane, vision is wed to doubt. As in Crane, an intimate grief lies ready to consume the present. As in Crane, a punishing patriarch looms. Though elsewhere in the poem a ghostly father is rendered lovingly, felt as a grieved absence, he first appears as guide to a more destructive place than even childhood memory, a place both of punishment and fulfilled desire, a place where punishment is in fact fulfilled desire, gestured toward early in the poem in a psychoanalytic setting:

Was it last night, asks the bearded man
in the armchair behind the sofa,
that you dreamed of a blue moon?
And why does this map of Europe
remind you of an orgy, or your
father, coming to beat you? (3)

Were Scroggins not so nimbly deflective, so masterfully ample in his interweaving of the personal with the cultural, the mythic, and the oneiric, he might have cribbed this, from Crane, for an epigram:

So memory, that strikes a rhyme out of a box
Or splits a random smell of flowers through glass-
Is it the whip stripped from the lilac tree
One day in spring my father took to me . . .

from “Van Winkle,” The Bridge

IV

Readers of Torture Garden, an earlier Scroggins volume, will admit no surprise in finding that the throes of conscience twinge in sync with the foundational pleasures of B&D. The ultimate pre-modernist erotic martyr, Swinburne, is summoned at the close of this new volume, as if called forth by all that life fails to be, outside of Zion. The pleasures and repressions of middle-class life, touching circumspectly, or not, on the mythic relation of the spirit of Protestantism to the rise of capitalism, only further, for Scroggins, the flays of conscience. Much in Zion Offramp is graceful, observant, curious about the outer world, calm, effortlessly masterful in its descriptive power, witty, rich, and moving. But for all the expert ways each of the fifty sections (each section about two pages long) presents feelings and scenes, there lurks an enlivening precariousness. The ghost of an outmoded sacrificial logic keeps demanding the ritual denigrations of the self, so to keep alive the imaginative riches of a world that routinely forsakes the further possibility those riches suggest. What impels the poetry, its cascade of vivid instances, its storytelling, its elegant transitions, its critical asides, its astute renderings of the median experiences of modern East Coast life, even its vigorous suicidal ideation, is a fear that, at any moment, we may be measured and found wanting. By this light, the elegies for Geoffrey Hill and Wyndham Lewis are cosmic judgement done up as literary biography. In each case, a pained but merciless portrait of a master of the art is rendered. The immense literary critical intelligence of the author is fully brought to bear on the question of the relation of the poet to his or her time. Hill and Lewis are admired, but both are failures of a certain sort. They’re at odds with the world they’re in, and not in a good way. Scroggins paints vivid portraits that integrate the life, the writing, and the cultural moment. We feel like we’re in the Inferno, maybe not way down deep, pained to be meeting masters who have sinned against the Imagination. They are unhappy, curtailed by circumstance, short on human virtues, however admirably dedicated they are to their art.

In literature as in life, some achieve abjectness, others have it thrust upon them. One of the book’s most memorable sections, section 15, centers on a beating, a tableau of cruelty. Some kind of judgment has been rendered. A woman has been left twisted up and stretched out on the pavement. With forensic eye the poet surveys the scene. Like Whitman in “The Sleepers,” Scroggins hovers, ghostly and aghast, alert to how the woman hurts. A sacrificial logic is implicit in the beating, an encounter cleansed of money as a motive. The victim has been roughed up for the sheer joy of it. Any religious significance for this violence, where we might sense, in the fallen world of Zion Offramp, a sacrificial system of exchange has been established between heaven and earth, shades into the logic of B&D, where the pain of one is explicitly understood as the pleasure of another. Scroggins dwells on her abject state, placing her in relation to several discourses of salvation, none of which are adequate. Her disorientation is cruelly intensified by a nearby television broadcast, which conveys in disconnected phrases spent remnants of the language of salvation. No help is coming from any realm, the final realm being that of the Christian universe. What is remarkably artful here is the how the poet touches on the scriptural, with a tenderness reminiscent of Whitman’s words for the neglected and beset, or closer to our time, the words of Allen Grossman, his finely grained laments for the outcast.

       Not seeing double but speaking
       double, a wiry and hermetic second
       text unrolling like an invisible
       crawl beneath the words
       the voice is speaking, and beneath
that another and another, and
so forth—or she lay on the ground
a long time, unmoving, and no one
       stopped to investigate, her fingers
       loosely woven in the long strap
            of her purse, hair slashed
            across her unmoving eyes—
The voice is talking again. It says
be calm, calm down, stay calm
for now. Wait and see, it says, if it were
not so
       I would have told you hair
         slashed across
       her staring eyes. A skip in the disk,
interruption in the stream, pages missing even
from the text—at some point, help’s got
       to come—you’re sure—an army of dwarves
       from the Iron Hills, special fleet
       of Federation starships, your
       next door neighbor knocking to find out
       why the dog’s barking and the lights
       are still on. Trimmed and burning,
through all these many mansions, and
no one home. (42-43)

However much the scene is qualified and questions raised about the nature of the reality whirling around the crime victim, about her own consciousness or lack of it within the motionless pose, on one hand, these lines satirically diminish the distinctions between Tolkien, Star Trek, and Christianity, on the other, the situation is so movingly rendered that the satire seems to recalibrate itself. We feel the poet working his way, with some dismay, toward the understanding that the Christian god, with his sublime affection for those who are suffering, has survived in the poet’s esteem until now, but is in jeopardy, and therefore the promise that there is a place in the Father’s mansion for those who have heard The Word.

V

The first line of Zion Offramp announces a narrative unfolding throughout the poem. We hardly need to be told. The narrative is well known. In fact, it is the narrative of all narratives, and Zion Offramp is an exegesis of its first full sentence: “Something happened.” This “something” is multivalent. At first, it’s intimate. A profoundly conflicted childhood, well, that sure happened. Then the “something” is historical: it’s the “something” that modernist and postmodern poetry never tires of telling: disappearance and return of ancient religious worlds within a recently established secular cosmos. The sentence recalls Joseph Heller’s masterwork of middle class white, heteronormative familial disaffection, Something Happened, alerting us, thereby, to the reportorial ambition of the poem. The poem will offer a true account of life as it is lived in our moment of ongoing angst. We learn along the way what folks wear, how they get around, how time passes in our modern Vanity Fair, how, that is, the wayward of the world miss the last exit to Zion. The “something” that “happened” could be, as has been noted, a mugging, but it is also, as the opening cantos of the poem make clear, the Fall. There is, then, a spiritual application of the sentence. The “something” could be the something that happened in Eden, that is replayed in each fallen moment, even though Eden veils itself with the visionary ideals of a previous epoch, as exemplified by Ruskin, Morris, and the pre-Raphaelites. The “something” that happened is in essence a creation myth. It offers a panoply of calamities from the midst of which the poem can heroically achieve balance, can temper its condemnations, can calibrate its praises. The lost radiance of our once divine origin, that which came before the happening of the something appears, in our time and in this poem as a highly aestheticized utopian hope. What can a worldly poet do but bring great stylistic finesse to his prophetic impulses? Scroggins is too decadent to preach, but he keeps turning over and around the question of what it was that happened, to him, to everyone, of what is still happening, interrupted, now and then, by a doubt: did it really happen? Is something else about to happen? Seriality, here, is inherently prophetic, but the prophetic conceals its blame and praise as aesthetic discernment. On this side of what will escape the flames of critical judgement, is, for the most part, music. If there is an avatar of the infinite who might intervene in our fallenness, restore the great chain of being, it’s Bootsy Collins, he who brings to the poem the doctrine of the One. More generally, the thing that most readily earns the poet’s assent is music. Anything touching on this subject is close to free of the eschatological unease that underlies the world the poem calls to be.

VI

Revere, wreck. Adore, destroy. Impulses in this ongoing poem are at odds. Expressions of his warring judgements upon passing things are most often stripped of outmoded pre-secular prophetic poetic forms, though now and then, just to let us know they’re there, Scroggins will call upon a divine figure. Pagan goddesses appear, occasionally descend. In his lines, the everyday of East Coast North American life is effortlessly congruent with the fantastical. Extravagant English precursors can be caught presiding over utopian tendencies, most especially John Ruskin, while others, suspicious of any redemptive direction, condone the poem’s dystopian drift. Despite the unruffled lucidity and grace that pulls together planes of existence together into a singular music, a barely concealed apocalypticism is never far from formally announcing itself. A figure Scroggins returns to, the girl on the train, is, in effect, the soul on a pilgrimage through the fallen world. (A girl appears at intervals throughout the poem and draws from the poet a bemused wonder that is a reenchanting of the world, even the world of the New York subway!) Zion Offramp damns and praises with equal grace, but it holds off bringing the world to an end. Life is just, so far, too interesting. And too, the poet is perpetually fending off an almost Yeatsian remorse. While awaiting some definitive ethical clarity the presiding consciousness of the poem can be by turns tragic, comic, historical, lyrical, profane, devout. Zion Offramp defers death by rising to the occasion of some new subject matter or state of being. Were we to allow ourselves the degree of self-knowledge the poet seems ultimately in pursuit of, would we have to consider that the immense readability of Zion Offramp brings with it moral unease? Are we enjoying this poetry too much? Are we, too, measured and found wanting, but unlike the poet, we just don’t know it yet? Do we await the second fifty sections with excitement, or apprehension?

—Joseph Donahue

Joseph Donahue’s books of poetry include Dark Church, Red Flash on a Black Field, The Disappearance of Fate, Wind Maps, and Infinite Criteria. Volumes four and five of his ongoing poem cycle Terra Lucida (Musica Callada, and Near Star) are forthcoming from Verge Editions.