Edge and Fold

Edge and Fold (Berkeley: Apogee Press, 2006) is available from the Small Press Distribution website at www.spdbooks.org. Type "Hoover, Paul" in the "Search for Books" box and all of his books currently available will appear, as well as issues of New American Writing, which he edits with Maxine Chernoff. The beautiful cover art is a photograph, Ball on Water (Pelota en agua), 1994, is by Gabriel Orozco, courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

"In Edge and Fold, Paul Hoover dearly and diligently avows that Vision now is a steadfast transparency at peace with circumstance. Here are poems keeping perfect time because our time flows through them--beloved, attended with eloquent humility, unimpeded by any imperium save its own. This book is pure!"

-Donald Revell

"Edge and Fold comes in short couplets that have the pith or aphorisms, but dismantle any expectation of closure. They push thinking over the edge into the folds of all my minds. In this amazing plural space (tenuously tethered to the white of the page) subtle, discriminating intelligences unfold lyric intensity into question, wonder, mystery.

the sound is in the wood
writing its disturbance
as deeply as it can
this is called music

Edge and Fold confirms Paul Hoover as one of our important poets."

-Rosmarie Waldrop

The book contains two long poems, "Edge and Fold" and "The Reading." The first consists of 49 numbered sections:

XVI

what you don’t know
doesn’t enter in

the paragraph is a mutt
and the comma goes away

reality’s proposition
is problematic, no?

gentlemen, start cognition
conception is a whole

she knew about peaches
she would make decisions

a curtain if there is one
all true things are song

"The Reading" is one of four poems to have been to have been handwritten in small Marble Memo pads using the day as the book's limit; that is, when all of the pages were filled, an entire book will have been written in a 24 hour period. Each asterisked section in the poem acknowledges a page of the memo pad:

Someone was
speaking of

“the infinite resources
of the thickness

of things.”
I had wanted

so thick
a vessel

it contained
nothing at all.

*

For example,
Francis Ponge

touching with
his nouns

the texture
of objects,

as if they
had windows

and desire
were all about.

*

What are the names
for the opposite of pencil,

engineer, and dowel?
What is not cloud

and what is not mouse?
You can’t create nothing,

and you can’t destroy it.

*

Nulla, nulla,
the world

keeps weeping,
filling the holes

invention
keeps creating.

The other "books" written by this means will eventually appear as At the Sound.