The Little Edges

When reading the work of Moten (The Feel Trio), one easily gets the idea that his linguistic world is beholden to motion. In his poems, nothing comes to rest, not even silence. Complicating matters further, the nouns that populate his newest book, a 2014 National Book Award finalist, are not those whose qualities lend them mobility: they are concrete, unambiguous, and resolutely present. Reading this work is a bit like watching someone perform surgery with a rock hammer—there are always elements doing what you don't expect and doing it with a kind of heavy precision. Further describing this "violent correctness," one might say that Moten fills his tornado with debris—be it a thin sliver of wood or a one-ton concrete drain pipe—with each piece as beautiful and potentially lethal as the next. Whereas most poetry is content to narrate the gestalt, Moten writes with the reluctant conviction of a witness: what he says is hard to articulate but necessary to hear.