The Little Edges [Paperback]

Winner of the Guggenheim Fellowship (2016)

The Little Edges is a collection of poems that extends poet Fred Moten’s experiments in what he calls “shaped prose”—a way of arranging prose in rhythmic blocks, or sometimes shards, in the interest of audio-visual patterning. Shaped prose is a form that works the “little edges” of lyric and discourse, and radiates out into the space between them. As occasional pieces, many of the poems in the book are the result of a request or commission to comment upon a work of art, or to memorialize a particular moment or person. In Moten’s poems, the matter and energy of a singular event or person are transformed by their entrance into the social space that they, in turn, transform. An online reader’s companion is available at http://fredmoten.site.wesleyan.edu.Poems that play in the sonic texture of discourses fortrd.fortrn
hand up to your ear
hard enough to enjoy
nothing, even more, and another.
aj, this for underneath your beautiful proof of concept.
eve is a texture dave is centering.
mudede waters like josé muñificent.
wait for it
the gramsci monument
all topological last friday evening
all
all up on that t-shirt
akomfrahgment
dance warm
sweet nancy wilson saved frank ramsay.
I lay with francis in the margin.
ra, your gignity our echo.
grad grind, gentles, till the park is gone.
jaki byard, blues for smoke
test
laura (made me listen to
Acknowledgments