About the poems

Music at the Heart of Thinking gathers a book-length sequence of poems that treats language itself as a mode of thought. The work deploys improvisatory strategies and formal risk to examine art, ideas and cultural moments across several decades.

The voice moves between jazz-inflected ad-lib, kinetic images drawn from martial practice, and a Romantic openness that resists tidy closure. These poems relocate critical discourse into poetic play, offering a notation of thinking-as-feeling rather than an argument.

Readers drawn to experimental long-form poetry and to writing that challenges habitual meaning will find sustained attention here: language that estranges in order to reveal new coherences.

• Themes: improvisation, estrangement, poetics of attention
• Rooted in the long-poem tradition of the 1980s
• 272 pages, paperback, Talonbooks (2020)

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